#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world

By · Published November 21st, 2024 ·
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In today’s episode, Keiran Harris speaks with Elizabeth Cox — founder of the independent production company Should We Studio — about the case that storytelling can improve the world.

They cover:

  • How TV shows and movies compare to novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction if you’re trying to do good.
  • The existing empirical evidence for the impact of storytelling.
  • Their competing takes on the merits of thinking carefully about target audiences.
  • Whether stories can really change minds on deeply entrenched issues, or whether writers need to have more modest goals.
  • Whether humans will stay relevant as creative writers with the rise of powerful AI models.
  • Whether you can do more good with an overtly educational show vs other approaches.
  • Elizabeth’s experience with making her new five-part animated show Ada — including why she chose the topics of civilisational collapse, kidney donations, artificial wombs, AI, and gene drives.
  • The pros and cons of animation as a medium.
  • Career advice for creative writers.
  • Keiran’s idea for a longtermist Christmas movie.
  • And plenty more.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Highlights

Empirical evidence of the impact of storytelling

Elizabeth Cox: So there are a couple psychological phenomena that are kind of relevant to this. I think one that’s especially helpful is this idea, it’s called the mere-exposure effect, which is basically that repeated exposures to certain portrayals make people positively inclined towards them, even if they’re completely novel things and ideas.

This is something that’s so old and so extensively studied that most of the recent studies on it are like little pieces of it. But for example, showing stalking and other kinds of emotionally abusive behaviours negatively in films makes people more inclined to view them negatively in real life and not romantic or whatever. And similarly, depictions of mental illness that are accurate, but not scary or fear mongering, and sort of humanising have a similar effect where they shift people’s perceptions on that.

So there’s a lot of examples like that. And I think there’s enough that we can be pretty confident that this idea of “deweirding” is credible. Which is good. We’ve got to start somewhere.

Looking at climate change and environmentalism and some of the history there I think are some of the best examples. There’s kind of no example bigger than An Inconvenient Truth, right? So there are a bunch of studies done to try to assess the impact of An Inconvenient Truth, and a couple that are kind of interesting. Again, there’s problems with all of these, but they’re decent.

One was looking at carbon offsets in the US in ZIP codes within 10 miles of a theatre that was screening An Inconvenient Truth — the control group was ones further away — and whether that increased. They found that it did. And of course, you can think of a lot of things that are confounding there, but a lot of them are actually still related to the impact of the film. So it’s pretty good.

Then another one that I think is kind of interesting and helpful — and maybe more useful to people who are trying to assess the impact of their own media and stories and things — was to analyse mentions of An Inconvenient Truth as sort of a proxy for impact, for how much it got into the public consciousness and zeitgeist.

Basically, what the study did is it was an analysis of the Climate Change Threat Index, which is basically assessing the overall perception of climate change in the US. And they took mentions of An Inconvenient Truth in The New York Times as sort of a way of measuring the zeitgeist — not just like, “It’s released, it’s out in the world,” but it’s still getting awards, it’s still getting talked about, it’s still getting debated — and actually found that it was the third most significant predictor of change in the Climate Change Threat Index from 2002 to 2010. Which is kind of crazy, but very cool, I thought.

And I think that idea of choosing something like mentions in The New York Times — adjust as needed for your thing — to use when you either don’t have data like views or retention, or you’re trying to assess something beyond what that information can tell you, is kind of cool and useful and helpful.

The hits-based approach to storytelling

Keiran Harris: So there’s the storytelling impact path of An Inconvenient Truth — where you just get into the public consciousness, and you have this very small impact on so many people that you end up having a big impact — and then kind of the opposite of that, which I think has also been true at least a couple of times, is having a big impact with just the right person or small group of people.

The one that stands out to me is apparently President Reagan, having watched The Day After — this TV movie on nuclear war that had a crazy amount of viewers in the ’80s — was so horrified that he completely updated on this topic of how important it was, in a way that I’m sure the people who were making it did not have this as an ambition. They were probably seeing it being more like An Inconvenient Truth of like, we just need to update everyone’s public consciousness a bit. But then you end up getting to the president of the United States and have this crazy impact.

Elizabeth Cox: One really similar one is with Nixon and The Andromeda Strain — which is a novel by Michael Crichton, who also wrote Jurassic Park — just totally updating his views on bioweapons as a threat worth taking seriously based on reading that book.

I’m always a tiny bit sceptical of when people are pointing to the things that most influence them, because did they really? But I think there are so many examples of tech leaders pointing to specific works of science fiction. I think a lot of them go as far as they gave them the idea for whatever thing they ended up inventing. But again, I treat that with a little bit of scepticism. I think Steve Jobs said that about Asimov’s work. I think Elon Musk said it about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a little bit harder for me to wrap my head around.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I was gonna say that because it’s very hard to predict — Hitchhikers is a good example, where maybe they wouldn’t expect this — maybe if you’re writing stories like that, you can almost think of yourself as being part of a portfolio of other science fiction writers. In this case, “I’m just going to contribute to this medium, and then one of the 1,000 of us doing work in this area is maybe going to influence the right people. And it probably won’t be me, but I’m still, in a sense, contributing — because I’m expanding the space of possible things people could run into.”

Elizabeth Cox: I think that’s a great way to think about it. And also, because of the need for repeated exposures to out-there ideas, that’s also sort of related to that: you might not be moving the needle entirely by yourself. And I actually don’t think that’s entirely different from people in most industries trying to have a positive impact on the world. I mean, it can feel more speculative and hand-wavy with works of fiction or other forms of storytelling, but I’m not actually sure that it is.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. It’s a great point, because if you are someone who starts a maternal health charity in sub-Saharan Africa, you may think you only have a 20% chance of this working out and having a big impact, but you should do it anyway. Because if you get enough people who are willing to make these bets, then eventually ones will pay off. And collectively, the thing that really should matter, at least, is just good being done in the universe — and the more we can get past this thing of, it needs to be me being the one having the impact, I think the world’s going to be better for that.

And I think it’s fair to apply that to storytelling, actually. Maybe there’s only one in 100 of these stories that have this big impact, but if the impact of that hundredth story is big enough, then it can kind of pay for the rest of us, in a way. It’s kind of like a VC firm who invests in 100 different companies. It’s like the successful ones sort of pay for the other ones.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, it’s definitely going to be a bit hits-based.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, exactly. It could just be that storytelling is a hits-based thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not high impact in expectation.

Debating the merits of thinking about target audiences

Elizabeth Cox: When I’m starting with an idea and arriving at the treatment for it, I don’t actually think it’s helpful to think super specifically about a target audience. For me, I am always trying to find the closest thing to a universal truth, or I guess trying to set an ambitious goal of, “If I were to do this as well as it could possibly be done, anyone would be able to relate to it.” Obviously, that’s a very ambitious goal that we’re never going to meet, but I do think that should be the starting point goal of anything. That’s how you find what’s important and meaningful, and will make people feel that the subject matter is connected, is important, or will make them feel connected to it.

When you look at the ways people consume content, kids love stuff that’s intended for adults, or ostensibly intended for adults, all the time; and adults love stuff that’s intended for kids all the time. So I really do think that these ideas of target audience that we have, or that are setting the mandate at broadcasters or commissioners or whatever, don’t super correspond to how people actually enjoy stories. So I am fairly resistant to that.

I also think, especially for less experienced people, you can fall into a trap of defining too narrow a target audience…I also think it’s just really hard to make something while thinking about the audience. I think it just kind of doesn’t work. It breaks the magic… So basically, I think that thinking too much about the target audience makes you think both too much and too little about pleasing people — and the results are bad.

Keiran Harris: So I want to push back on this, because that was my one dominating concern as I was watching all the episodes of Ada: I just kept asking myself who the target audience was. Which makes a lot more sense now.

I’ll outline why this would concern me with two extremes. One would be that you went into the final script of Ada and you were like, “I intend this to be for people who have a bachelor’s degree at least in some kind of scientific discipline,” or something like that. Right? Fairly high level of knowledge going in. And in that case, it would mean that that audience would be kind of bored if you held their hands too much, so you would have to be comfortable with a bit of jargon and moving at quite a fast pace.

But on the other end, you could aim for people who, either they’re in high school, or they just went to a different profession, or really have no scientific background — in which case, you really have to define basically everything for them to be able to follow the story. And so I noticed within Ada there were times when it felt like it was flipping between this sort of audience, where there’s a tone where I thought, “This is for younger people. Ada’s 22. Maybe it’s for people who are a bit younger than her, introducing that topic.”

But then something would happen, like there’s an episode with gene drives: I mean, you only have 10 minutes, but it was like a one-sentence explanation of gene drives and casually mentioned CRISPR. And I couldn’t help but thinking, “There is no way teenagers or people in their early 20s without experience will be able to know what this is. They don’t know what CRISPR is.”

So I just kept getting caught between thinking if we knew we were aiming for people under 20 without much of a background, I would want to go through the script and put a big red line under every piece of jargon and term and try to define it. On the other end, if you were like, “No, this is for people who understand all that stuff,” then you can move faster.

But I felt like without having a clear target audience, you can get into this thing where the tone is for one group, but then that group might not be able to follow the concepts. And if you lose them on the concepts, then they don’t get to follow the narrative arc.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. Definitely the gene drives episode was, you are correct, the most difficult one to balance this stuff in. And part of that is, I think it would come up with any target audience if you’re trying to focus on the ethics of emerging technologies or technologies that don’t exist yet. Because we’re not focusing on the technical, the “how does this work” side. We’re not focusing on that; we’re focusing on the implications. But there is some amount of the “how does it work” that you have to explain. … I think some of the tensions you point out are definitely there. But I am not sure that I would attach them to not having a focused-enough target audience.

Ada vs other approaches to impact-focused storytelling

Keiran Harris: I recorded an 80,000 Hours Podcast episode with A.J. Jacobs a few years ago. In that episode I said to him that I thought the best approach to making a high-impact TV show by our lights was probably something like: you make something like a Mad Men — same level of writing, directing, and acting and everything — but instead of it being set in Madison Avenue in the ’50s through ’70s, it’s like an Open Philanthropy-like org, so a premier grantmaking organisation, maybe in a world where effective altruism didn’t exist.

Or another idea would be you make something like a Breaking Bad, but instead of Walter White making this money for his family, he’s earning to give, planning to donate all this money to effective charities. Although I realise that a lot of listeners will think that now sounds like a much worse idea in the wake of the FTX implosion. But anyway, stay with me.

So during COVID I wrote a pilot and a 10-episode series outline for a show that I called Bequest. I ended up trying to combine elements of both of these ideas, in that the characters about halfway through the show start an Open Phil-like org, and also it’s pretty dark and violent. I’ll put up links for my script and the series outline in the show notes for anyone that is listening who would rather check out both Ada and Bequest before listening to this section.

Basically, my overall thinking was that you try to make a show that’s popular independent of the message, and then if folks are super engaged, they’ll kind of helplessly learn about a lot of EA stuff. You almost can’t help but be able to pass a simple quiz on Madison Avenue in the ’60s if you’re a Mad Men fan.
But in big red letters in my mind, I thought it would be good to try and avoid, as much as you can, coming across as being preachy or overtly educational, because I felt like you’d lose a lot of people. So I’m just very curious, what do you think of that broad approach?

Elizabeth Cox: I think being preachy and being overtly educational, I wouldn’t say they’re the same thing.

Keiran Harris: No, I meant those being different things, actually. I meant: one thing is to avoid being preachy and then there’s another thing of [being educational].

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. So I think overtly educational is fine, as long as you’re not making it seem like you’re trying not to be educational, right? You have to be open about it. Actually, I think there’s more examples of this in literature and fiction than in TV and films — in part because the exposition of making things educational is a little bit easier to work in. But I think a really good example of something that’s narrative but overtly educational and intended for an adult audience is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s a great example of something that has been overtly educational, but also the point of it is fiction. So I think I agree with you on “definitely don’t be preachy.” I don’t think I agree on “don’t be educational.”

Keiran Harris: I was curious in your take on having both these things exist. So you have things like Ada, and then you have things more in this realm that I’m talking about.

Elizabeth Cox: I don’t think I really see impact downsides between these two approaches. For me, the big risks for impact-oriented media projects, like the big failure modes, are not getting made and not getting released. The “not getting made” thing can happen at lots of phases, right? It can happen when the script isn’t made into a pilot, the pilot isn’t made into a series, the series is cancelled quickly if we’re talking about TV shows.

But also — and this has never happened to me, fortunately, so far — but a lot of my team who worked on Ada, I think almost all of them, had this experience at some time or other, that you make the movie or the show, it’s completely finished, and then it doesn’t get released because the network, or whoever owns the IP, whoever’s funding it, decides for whatever reason not to do that.

I think the risks of those things happening increase with bigger budget, prestige drama-type things, because the kind of money it takes to make these things means you’re going to be almost certainly — as the creator and the person whose incentive is impact as opposed to making money — going to be relinquishing control over the IP completely. So you don’t really have control. Many sort of perverse forces can prevent your thing from getting out into the world, even if it’s great. So I think that is the main drawback I see.

Why animation?

Elizabeth Cox: Well, first of all, we’re making stuff about the future and worlds that don’t exist yet. Animation is a medium that lets you invent a world completely from scratch, every single thing in it, which I find super exciting and I think lends itself really well to work about the future or alternative futures or imagination.

My personal attachment to animation: my whole career so far, pretty much, has been in animation. And the reason for that is that I came to it through a fine art background, drawing and painting, as opposed to through a film background. So the artistry was always the thing that got me most excited.

I think with still drawings and paintings, I eventually realised that the thing that was most compelling to me about visual art was the opportunity to tell a story. And the amount of story you can tell in a single painting is kind of limited. Art historians are going to come for me, but I think it’s true.

So that was how I found my way to animation. Just the variety and diversity of looks and techniques within animation are super exciting. I’m just also really drawn to sort of wacky stuff, to weirdness and joy and cheekiness, and I think it lends itself really well to that as a medium.

There are also reasons it’s good for educational stuff specifically. If you’re trying to be explanatory, it’s easy to add a layer of information density without it feeling more dense to the viewer.

I also think that at its best, educational animated stuff is not doing what we call “show and say,” which is the visuals exactly repeat what’s in the words. You’re using visual humour and visual metaphors to sort of complement the words. And I’ve always been sort of drawn to visual puns. I’m outing myself as a giant nerd here, but the ancient Egyptians used to do hieroglyphic puns, using the shape of the hieroglyphs to make little jokes. And same with illuminated manuscripts: there’s all this subtext annotated into them that’s just hilarious. It’s a whole other story. So that kind of humour is very exciting to me.

Keiran Harris: Have you come across any major drawbacks to animation as a medium, especially if your ultimate goal is impact?

Elizabeth Cox: It’s slow, so I don’t think it’s the best medium for breaking news. I see that as the biggest drawback: it’s hard to react quickly to things.

It’s also expensive, but it’s interesting because it’s expensive for a super low-budget indie. But if you’re trying to make really beautiful sci-fi fantasy second world stuff, it is much cheaper or much more feasible on an indie budget than it would be to do that live action and have all those visual effects. So that is both a pro and a con.

And also prejudice: I think definitely some people still see animation as for kids, even though that has never been the case. And I think for even some distributors and commissioners, an animated project has to fit into the bucket of for kids or the raunchy, shock humour, adult cartoons type of thing: it has to be one or the other. But really, animation’s a medium; it’s not a genre. It can be applied to any genre equally effectively.

So that’s a frustration. I don’t think it’s a drawback of animation, but it is a drawback of trying to sell animation, so maybe to try to create impact through animation.

How long will humans stay relevant as creative writers, given AI advances?

Keiran Harris: It feels to me like the prospects for writers are a bit worse than for visual artists, because there is definitely something to be said that people want to go to a museum or an art gallery, and it does seem like they have this strong preference for it them to be able to say that a human made that thing.

But I wonder if, once GPT-7 or whatever can write at the level of someone who’s writing a show for Netflix… Because it’s so hidden already, and it’s not like screenwriters are typically celebrities either. It’s a bit different in the theatre: if you’re a playwright in the theatre, you really are kind of the main person. But for TV shows and films, fans want to know who the screenwriter is, but it’s a little bit more hidden.

And obviously it’s just pure speculation, but I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that might not hang around much beyond the point where you can just objectively say, “The best script written last year was written by an AI rather than a human.”

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, I think that’s probably a more productive way of thinking about it, rather than trying to make a judgement on whether AI has better written or visual capabilities now…

I think your point about people’s strong preference for something to be made by humans is a good one, but I do think there’s a chance it’ll apply to some forms of written craft. When you think about the fact that people really love having books as physical objects in their houses, even though we can read all the books on our phones now…

Keiran Harris: Does this come up for you when you’re thinking about your long-term career?

Elizabeth Cox: I mean, emotionally, definitely what I feel is I’ve got to execute all my best ideas as quickly as possible while it still matters that I’m the person doing them. And that I hope AI doesn’t replace people in creative things. But I don’t think that’s necessarily rational, or even in my self-interest: you know, if AI is going well and making things great, that would be good for me. Would I rather keep writing novels or have every disease be cured? Well, emotionally I would rather keep writing novels.

Keiran Harris: No, it’s very human of you to think that. And maybe this is easier for me to think about because currently my job is running this podcast, not doing creative writing. For me, if you told me that in a year, GPT-5 is just going to be the best podcast producer and manager and whatever the hell I do every day, it’s better at everything, then I could actually be like, “Great, I get to just write then.”

And maybe it’s better at writing novels, and maybe it’s better at writing movies too, but I just love writing. So it doesn’t actually feel too scary to me.

Elizabeth Cox: I think two sources of motivation for me that are maybe slightly impure, but I think they’re the same for a lot of creative people, are: first of all, the drive to make the next thing better, and put what you’ve learned and the new ideas you have into use; and this idea that you could make something that is novel and just really good. That’s very motivating.

And also, for me, what art is in any form — whether it’s written, visual, or whatever — is universal things expressed through unique specifics that right now comes from the person who’s making it. So obviously I have a pretty strong attachment to my own weird little worldview in that way…

I will say I think there’s a lot of elements of writing that are not putting words on a page or digital page, like the “management of story” process. And it’s interesting to think about what that might look like in a world where all of the actual writing can be done just as well by AI.

Keiran Harris: That’s really interesting, because I think it’s the case that already people are obsessed with doing the Wordle or the Spelling Bee puzzles that they do every day, which is not their jobs.

And to me, writing is the best example of that. The funnest part for me is sort of painting yourself into these boxes and being like, well, this thing has to have a good reason for happening. How does this land? How do these things come together?

Not to get too writing advice-y or something, but you don’t want to have a story that’s like, “This happened, and then another thing happened, and then also this thing happened.” You need everything to be tight, like, “This happened, therefore this happened. And because this happened, this happens.” And it all has to be interconnected. I find it to be a very compelling puzzle, where I would rather do that than do the Wordle or something.

So yeah, I don’t know. I think there is a more positive framing potentially, where it’s like: OK, AIs are the best at everything. However, boy, it would be nice to write these stories, solve these puzzles, play instruments that you never would have otherwise had a chance to because you were working as like the junior vice president at Pepsi, and that was your entire life. And now you get to do things that are more fun.

Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show

Material you might want to check out before listening:

Elizabeth’s previous work:

Movies, TV shows, and books that successfully influenced ideas:

Impactful creative careers:

Problems that influential media could help get into the mainstream:

Other 80,000 Hours podcast episodes:

Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Elizabeth Cox: I think there are so many examples of tech leaders pointing to specific works of science fiction. I think a lot of them go as far as they gave them the idea for whatever thing they ended up inventing. So I think Steve Jobs said that about Asimov’s work. I think Elon Musk said it about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a little bit harder for me to wrap my head around.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. Maybe if you’re writing stories like that, you can almost think of yourself as being part of a portfolio of other science fiction writers, in this case: “I’m just going to contribute to this medium, and then one of the 1,000 of us doing work in this area is maybe going to influence the right people. And it probably won’t be me, but I’m still, in a sense, contributing — because I’m expanding the space of possible things people could run into.”

Elizabeth Cox: I think that’s a great way to think about it. And also, because of the need for repeated exposures to out-there ideas, you might not be moving the needle entirely by yourself. And I actually don’t think that’s entirely different from people in most industries trying to have a positive impact on the world. It can feel more speculative with works of fiction or other forms of storytelling, but I’m not actually sure that it is.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:04]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners. This is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast. In today’s episode, my colleague Keiran Harris talks with Elizabeth Cox about whether storytelling can be a force for good in the world.

TV shows and movies get the most airtime in the interview, as that’s what Elizabeth’s production company has been working on lately, and where Keiran has focused most of his own creative writing energy, but they also cover novels, short stories, creative nonfiction, and even advice columns.

Specifically, they talk about:

  • The existing empirical evidence for the impact of storytelling.
  • Their competing takes on the merits of thinking carefully about target audiences.
  • Whether stories can really change minds on deeply entrenched issues, or whether writers need to have more modest goals.
  • Whether humans will stay relevant as creative writers with the rise of powerful AI models.
  • Whether you can do more good with an overtly educational show vs other approaches.
  • Elizabeth’s new five-part animated TV show Ada — including why she chose the topics of civilisational collapse, kidney donations, artificial wombs, AI, and gene drives.
  • Keiran’s idea for a longtermist Christmas movie.
  • And much more.

For me, this was a really fun episode to listen to. I was just totally engaged and engrossed throughout, despite not being particularly interested in storytelling as a topic going into it. I hope you enjoy it!

Without further ado, I bring you Keiran Harris and Elizabeth Cox.

The interview begins [00:02:52]

Keiran Harris: Today I’m speaking with Elizabeth Cox. Elizabeth is the founder of Should We Studio, an independent production company dedicated to projects that will raise awareness of the most important issues facing humanity. Before that, she was the senior editorial producer at TED-Ed, where she wrote and edited the scripts for over 200 educational animated videos on all sorts of subjects, which to date have hundreds of millions of views and more than 10,000 years of watch time. She also graduated from Brown University.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Is storytelling really a high-impact career option? [00:03:26]

Keiran Harris: All right, to start off with, why should anyone believe us when we claim that writing stories could be a genuinely good option for a high-impact career?

Elizabeth Cox: I think the biggest and most important way is that stories get new issues and new ways of thinking about those issues into the public consciousness that weren’t before, which is essential to making progress on anything.

So I think climate change is kind of a good yardstick for everything else. And the case for how stories and films and books got that into the public consciousness, and also the lifecycle of going from niche to mainstream to partisan to ubiquitous and kind of back to nonpartisan is a really interesting lifecycle for an issue.

But in general, I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think stories are the best way to bring them in.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, I love it. We’re about to get into all that. But a classic final question that I wrote for The 80,000 Hours Podcast is: If you just had to completely change careers and you somehow became totally indifferent to making the world a better place, what would be the most self-indulgent or most enjoyable career for you to pursue instead? For me, writing TV shows and movies would be my answer if I was asked that. So I’m wondering if you and I should be a little bit suspicious if we have this shared opinion that storytelling can be great, and at the same time, it’s exactly our dream job — if, in fact, it is your dream job?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, it’s totally my dream job, and we should definitely be suspicious. Short answer.

I think for me also, it was a very direct switch from, I was pre-med; I was planning to be a doctor who paints on the side. And I made the switch from that to like, “I’m gonna make cartoons!” I should definitely be suspicious of my motives there. I think also when I first started learning about EA, I was like, “At last! A justification for my choice not to become a doctor: too many smart, empathetic people are competing for it. It doesn’t make any marginal difference if I do it.” So yeah, definitely cause to be suspicious.

But on the other hand, I think people who pursue creative careers actually have to examine their motives for doing so a lot more than most people. Because if you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, a management consultant, the peanut gallery of aunties and neighbours and parents and all that is just like, “Great, good for you! Sounds good.”

Whereas if you’re doing something creative or artistic, there’s a lot of like, “Ooh, are you sure about that?” It’s no secret that these careers are not particularly lucrative or stable. And also in the early years of them, there’s not these sort of milestones that you can see, where it’s like, “I’m making progress towards the goal of becoming what I want to become.” It’s a lot of low-paid, low-status, boring work at first, and it can be really unclear if it’s progressing in the right direction until suddenly something shifts and you get a good opportunity. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities for self-reflection, and assessing whether this is really the thing to do.

Keiran Harris: Yeah.

Empirical evidence for the impact of storytelling [00:06:51]

Keiran Harris: Do we have solid empirical evidence about the potential impact of storytelling? Do we have papers, studies, experiments that’ll give us something for effective altruism-y people to look at and be like, “Yeah, that checks out”?

Elizabeth Cox: Some. I think it’s worth saying up front that there are a couple things that make this difficult. One is that all of them are psychology or social science studies, so none of them are impeccable.

Keiran Harris: They may not replicate.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, exactly. And then the other thing is, and I’m not sure this is something people are generally aware of, but even as a filmmaker or someone whose work ends up somewhere like Netflix, where it’s getting seen by tonnes of people, you’re not going to have any data on that. The data available to you is basically the data that’s available to the public, which is basically nothing. You don’t even get access to the view count for most shows, unless you’re in the top five Netflix shows ever.

So those are the two things I would say up front. But that being said, there are some kind of all-right studies. Basically, I think that this theory of change of bringing things into the public consciousness relies on the premise that the more times people see something, the more likely they are to be sympathetic to it or think it’s not weird or whatever. Which sounds very basic and intuitive, but we should investigate that premise.

So there are a couple psychological phenomena that are kind of relevant to this. I think one that’s especially helpful is this idea, it’s called the mere-exposure effect, which is basically that repeated exposures to certain portrayals make people positively inclined towards them, even if they’re completely novel things and ideas.

This is something that’s so old and so extensively studied that most of the recent studies on it are like little pieces of it. But for example, showing stalking and other kinds of emotionally abusive behaviours negatively in films makes people more inclined to view them negatively in real life and not romantic or whatever. And similarly, depictions of mental illness that are accurate, but not scary or fear mongering, and sort of humanising have a similar effect where they shift people’s perceptions on that.

So there’s a lot of examples like that. Those are just a few. And I think there’s enough that we can be pretty confident that this idea of “deweirding” is credible. Which is good. We’ve got to start somewhere.

Looking at climate change and environmentalism and some of the history there I think are some of the best examples. There’s kind of no example bigger than An Inconvenient Truth, right? So there are a bunch of studies done to try to assess the impact of An Inconvenient Truth, and a couple that are kind of interesting. Again, there’s problems with all of these, but they’re decent.

One was looking at carbon offsets in the US in ZIP codes within 10 miles of a theatre that was screening An Inconvenient Truth — the control group was ones further away — and whether that increased. They found that it did. And of course, you can think of a lot of things that are confounding there, but a lot of them are actually still related to the impact of the film. So it’s pretty good.

Then another one that I think is kind of interesting and helpful — and maybe more useful to people who are trying to assess the impact of their own media and stories and things — was to analyse mentions of An Inconvenient Truth as sort of a proxy for impact, for how much it got into the public consciousness and zeitgeist.

Basically, what the study did is it was an analysis of the Climate Change Threat Index, which is basically assessing the overall perception of climate change in the US. And they took mentions of An Inconvenient Truth in The New York Times as sort of a way of measuring the zeitgeist — not just like, “It’s released, it’s out in the world,” but it’s still getting awards, it’s still getting talked about, it’s still getting debated — and actually found that it was the third most significant predictor of change in the Climate Change Threat Index from 2002 to 2010. Which is kind of crazy, but very cool, I thought.

And I think that idea of choosing something like mentions in The New York Times — adjust as needed for your thing — to use when you either don’t have data like views or retention, or you’re trying to assess something beyond what that information can tell you, is kind of cool and useful and helpful.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally. It just made me think that there’s one path to the storytelling impact of An Inconvenient Truth — where it’s like you just get into the public consciousness, and you have this very small impact on so many people that you end up having a big impact — and then kind of the opposite of that, which I think has also been true at least a couple of times, is having a big impact with just the right person or small group of people.

The one that stands out to me is apparently President Reagan, having watched The Day After — this TV movie on nuclear war that had a crazy amount of viewers in the ’80s — was so horrified that he completely updated on this topic of how important it was, in a way that I’m sure the people who were making it did not have this as an ambition. They were probably seeing it being more like An Inconvenient Truth of like, we just need to update everyone’s public consciousness a bit. But then you end up getting to the president of the United States and have this crazy impact.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of other examples like that?

Elizabeth Cox: One really similar one is with Nixon and The Andromeda Strain — which is a novel by Michael Crichton, who also wrote Jurassic Park — just totally updating his views on bioweapons as a threat worth taking seriously based on reading that book.

And I’m always a tiny bit sceptical of when people are pointing to the things that most influence them, because did they really? But I think there are so many examples of tech leaders pointing to specific works of science fiction. I think a lot of them go as far as they gave them the idea for whatever thing they ended up inventing. But again, I treat that with a little bit of scepticism. I think Steve Jobs said that about Asimov’s work. I think Elon Musk said it about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a little bit harder for me to wrap my head around.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I was gonna say that because it’s very hard to predict — Hitchhikers is a good example, where maybe they wouldn’t expect this — maybe if you’re writing stories like that, you can almost think of yourself as being part of a portfolio of other science fiction writers. In this case, “I’m just going to contribute to this medium, and then one of the 1,000 of us doing work in this area is maybe going to influence the right people. And it probably won’t be me, but I’m still, in a sense, contributing — because I’m expanding the space of possible things people could run into.”

Elizabeth Cox: I think that’s a great way to think about it. And also, because of the need for repeated exposures to out-there ideas, that’s also sort of related to that: you might not be moving the needle entirely by yourself. And I actually don’t think that’s entirely different from people in most industries trying to have a positive impact on the world. I mean, it can feel more speculative and hand-wavy with works of fiction or other forms of storytelling, but I’m not actually sure that it is.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, yeah. It’s a great point, because if you are someone who starts a maternal health charity in sub-Saharan Africa, you may think you only have a 20% chance of this working out and having a big impact, but you should do it anyway. Because if you get enough people who are willing to make these bets, then eventually ones will pay off. And collectively, the thing that really should matter, at least, is just good being done in the universe — and the more we can get past this thing of, it needs to be me being the one having the impact, I think the world’s going to be better for that.

And I think it’s fair to apply that to storytelling, actually. Maybe there’s only one in 100 of these stories that have this big impact, but if the impact of that hundredth story is big enough, then it can kind of pay for the rest of us, in a way. It’s kind of like a VC firm who invests in 100 different companies. It’s like the successful ones sort of pay for the other ones.

Elizabeth Cox: It’s definitely going to be a bit hits-based.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, exactly. It could just be like storytelling is just a hits-based thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not high impact in expectation.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah.

Keiran Harris: Do we know anything about if certain approaches seem to work better? We just talked about sci-fi but comedy versus romance versus darker stuff? Do we have any empirical evidence on this kind of thing?

Elizabeth Cox: Not empirical evidence. I have ideas. But actually, this is something we’ve tried to look into for various funding proposals and things at various points over the past few years. And there are studies on it, but everything we found was too specific to be useful, like talking about really specific approaches to storytelling in a really specific context. I don’t think there’s anything more meta or generalisable, at least not that we could find. Maybe someone’s doing it as we speak. I hope so. It’s one of my white whales.

How storytelling can inform us [00:16:25]

Keiran Harris: I was wondering if you have anything that stands out to you as a show or a movie where you didn’t know much about the topic, and then you felt like it was this very informative experience?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, there’s one film that sort of stands out above all the rest. It’s an indie animated short film, which is my all-time favourite medium. And it’s called World of Tomorrow. It came out in 2015, and the premise is fairly basic. Basically, a little girl gets visited by a clone from the future, several generations ahead, who’s trying to retrieve a memory from her that’s gotten lost in the iterations of replicating her mind. So not a wild concept, but excellent execution.

And at the time, I hadn’t really thought about the ethics around emerging technologies at all. It really just flipped a switch for me. I left watching it just like mind blown, thinking through, arguing with the film in my head, and all the, “I don’t know if I agree with this. I don’t agree with that.” Just having that sort of expansive mind feeling of there’s so much more I could learn about this.

And I think I trace starting Should We Studio — and the reasoning behind the choices I made to make the series we made, Ada, and to make it the way we did — I trace that back to that, and I traced my interest in tech ethics back to that. And you know, it’s just like a goofy little 10-minute short film with stick figures, but it was just beautiful and mind-blowing.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that’s great. So what were the next steps from that point? So you watch the movie, you start arguing with yourself about it. What happened then?

Elizabeth Cox: I think this kind of relates to how I think storytelling can be impactful. I think it’s pretty rare for one thing to do it all the way. Something can change your mind, but how many times have we had our mind changed about something and not done anything about it? It usually takes another push from another piece of media later.

But for me, the first way it manifested was a few years later, I was working for TED-Ed, and I was able to pitch educational videos on a wide range of subjects. One of the areas I was particularly interested in was these sort of speculative technologies and the actual obstacles to making them a reality.

So I worked on one that was about experiments we can do to find out whether the universe is a simulation. And then the one that really got me thinking back to some of the stuff World of Tomorrow had started for me — and eventually to starting my own studio and making the [Ada] series — was about whole brain emulation, but it was about what are the technical obstacles to making this a reality? So very much on the “can we” end of things rather than the “should we” end of things. But through the process of making that, I found myself more interested in the ethical side of like, is this a good idea? What would we have to do to make this go well?

And it was another few years before I did any of this, but I kind of couldn’t let it go after that. I think the final push for me came from reading The Precipice in early 2020. It kind of just pulled together all the strings of these things I’d been muddling on for years. Then that was the kick to finally make the leap.

Keiran Harris: Right. That’s cool. But it sounds like it’s very plausible that if you didn’t have that initial experience with the story, you may never have found The Precipice?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, definitely. And I think that initial film, it also helped me recognise a lot of recurring themes that are interesting to me — like unintended consequences, especially of choices we don’t realise we’re making, and tensions between individual and collective — that are sort of central to the work I do now, and I think central to what drew me to some of the ideas in EA and The Precipice and things like that.

Keiran Harris: Nice. I’ve got a few things in this category. Dr. Strangelove was one for me, where it does pretty accurately cover the absurdity of nuclear warfare. And then The Pianist was one for me as well for the Holocaust. I mean, Schindler’s List would do a similar thing, but it’s asking a lot of someone to watch an eight-hour documentary on the Holocaust; if you watch a really brilliant film, you’re going to get a lot there.

And then one that stood out to me was 12 Angry Men — a movie in the ’50s made about one person on a jury who’s a holdout, and 11 people want to convict straight away. And the whole movie is just in the deliberation room. But that stood out to me because, as far as I know, you can’t film a documentary of a jury deliberating. In every, like, true crime doc or something that’s about like a jury case, you have to interview them after the fact.

So that was one where I’m like, oh, it’s actually possible for fiction, for a movie in this case, to show you something that you can’t see otherwise. Someone can have this experience and tell you something that’s actually pretty relevant for the criminal justice system: this story about how people are just so judgemental straight away, and they don’t really look at evidence. And you’d like to think it’s all this very careful, rational reasoning, but maybe people just don’t like the defendant.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, for sure. I think those are all really good examples.

How long will humans stay relevant as creative writers? [00:21:54]

Keiran Harris: Do you have a take for how long you think humans will stay relevant as creative writers, given the rise of large language models like GPT and Claude?

Elizabeth Cox: Nope. No. I mean, longer answer: I think this question combines two things we are very bad at, which is predicting how technologies will shape even the near future, and predicting what we ourselves are going to do in the near- or longer-term future. So yeah, I really have no idea.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that’s very fair. I’m getting at how we think creative writing might stand up versus even other writing jobs maybe. It feels to me like the prospects for writers are a bit worse than for visual artists, because there is definitely something to be said that people want to go to a museum or an art gallery, and it does seem like they have this strong preference for it them to be able to say that a human made that thing. If you go and print out a bunch of Midjourney AI photos that are really beautiful, and you put them on canvases and you put them in an art gallery, maybe the first time someone does that it’s kind of interesting, but generally it seems like that’s not super appealing.

But I wonder if, once GPT-7 or whatever can write at the level of someone who’s writing a show for Netflix… Because it’s so hidden already, and it’s not like screenwriters are typically celebrities either. It’s a bit different in the theatre: if you’re a playwright in the theatre, you really are kind of the main person. But for TV shows and films, fans want to know who the screenwriter is, but it’s a little bit more hidden.

And obviously it’s just pure speculating, like anyone at this point, but I wonder if that’s the kind of thing that might not hang around much beyond the point where you can just objectively say, “The best script written last year was written by an AI rather than a human.”

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, I think that’s probably a more productive way of thinking about it, rather than trying to make a judgement on whether AI has better written or visual capabilities now. I don’t know. A lot of TV shows are also kind of already garbage.

Keiran Harris: Oh yeah, I was going to say that too. If you went through Netflix, all the movies and TV shows, what percentage do you think are well written? It’s already a pretty small percentage. And I think already the cutting-edge LLMs could probably take a bunch of those jobs.

Elizabeth Cox: Right now, because some of this stuff is so rigidly formulaic, I have found in my own experiments it to be worse at structural things than sentence-level writing, which is kind of interesting. But who knows how that’ll change.

I think your point about people’s strong preference for something to be made by humans is a good one, but I do think there’s a chance it’ll apply to some forms of written craft. When you think about the fact that people really love having books as physical objects in their houses, even though we can read all the books on our phones now… That’s a little bit different, because one of the things I love so much about writing is that it isn’t attached to a physical object. It’s like this fundamental unit of story that can be transmitted freely. You don’t have to be able to go to a museum to see it.

But I do think knowing something was written by a human might still carry some kind of weight for people if that’s something people continue to care about. It’s also kind of interesting for me, because the whole notion of something being handmade is not something I super care about as a consumer. But obviously, it would be cool for me if people did continue to care about it.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally. I have the same sort of take. Where if I’m being honest, if you give me season eight of Mad Men — there are only seven seasons that were made — and it’s as good, and it’s exactly what I would have expected if the original crew got together and made it, I bet I’d get over it pretty quickly in terms of my enjoyment. I don’t think I’d be there like, “I don’t find this compelling anymore.” I suppose, at least initially, you might even have some slight preference, because it’s just fascinating that you’re in the presence of this magic box that can do something like that.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, for sure.

Keiran Harris: I guess this probably is the same thing, where you just have no idea, but does this come up for you when you’re thinking about your long-term career? Thinking like, “What do I want to be doing in 10, 15 years?” Do you want to make creative nonfiction? Do you want to write novels? Do you want to make movies? Do you start to think like, “Ugh, what if GPT-6 is just so good that the prospects of that just go way down?” Because then you can get comparable quality writing for three cents.

Elizabeth Cox: I mean, emotionally, definitely what I feel is I’ve got to execute all my best ideas as quickly as possible while it still matters that I’m the person doing them. And that I hope AI doesn’t replace people in creative things. But I don’t think that’s necessarily rational, or even in my self-interest: you know, if AI is going well and making things great, that would be good for me. Would I rather keep writing novels or have every disease be cured? Well, emotionally I would rather keep writing novels.

Keiran Harris: No, it’s very human of you to think that. And maybe this is easier for me to think about because currently my job is running this podcast, not doing creative writing. For me, if you told me that in a year, GPT-5 is just going to be the best podcast producer and manager and whatever the hell I do every day, it’s better at everything, then I could actually be like, “Great, I get to just write then.”

And maybe it’s better at writing novels, and maybe it’s better at writing movies too, but I just love writing. So it doesn’t actually feel too scary to me as long as… Obviously a lot has to go right for the world to be OK, but putting that to the side, just say it’s a good future; it’s closer to these at least positive futures, if not utopias. But yeah, that doesn’t really strike me as being terrible, personally.

But it does make sense that, because you’ve already managed to do this professionally, it is hard to get past this idea of, “Technically, I could still do all the projects I wanted to do, but maybe many fewer people will read it or see them or they don’t need me.” How challenging is that for you to think about?

Elizabeth Cox: I think two sources of motivation for me that are maybe slightly impure, but I think they’re the same for a lot of creative people, are: first of all, the drive to make the next thing better, and put what you’ve learned and the new ideas you have into use; and this idea that you could make something that is novel and just really good. That’s very motivating.

And also, for me, what art is in any form — whether it’s written, visual, or whatever — is universal things expressed through unique specifics that right now comes from the person who’s making it. So obviously I have a pretty strong attachment to my own weird little worldview in that way.

And again, impure: I hate the term “creators” because it’s just like marketing-copy speak, but it is strangely apt, because the process of making stuff is: you are the god, the creator of this tiny universe where the rules are what you make them. And I’m a control freak, and I like controlling every detail of my little universes, and at least hanging on to the delusion that maybe someday I can do it better than anyone else could for my tiny universe.

So again, these are all emotional things. I also think that, like, do I like writing? I don’t know. I can’t seem to stop doing it, though. And I think probably a lot of writers feel that way. I think if AI was taking over all the professional creative work, probably I might go back to doing more drawing and less writing, although I can’t say for sure.

I will say I think there’s a lot of elements of writing that are not putting words on a page or digital page, like the “management of story” process. And it’s interesting to think about what that might look like in a world where all of the actual writing can be done just as well by AI.

Keiran Harris: That’s really interesting, because I think it’s the case that already people are obsessed with doing the Wordle or the Spelling Bee puzzles that they do every day, which is not their jobs.

And to me, writing is the best example of that for me, sort of painting yourself into these boxes and being like, well, this thing has to have a good reason for happening. How does this land? How do these things come together?

Not to get too writing advice-y or something, but you don’t want to have a story that’s like, “This happened, and then another thing happened, and then also this thing happened.” You need everything to be tight, like, “This happened, therefore this happened. And because this happened, this happens.” And it all has to be interconnected. I find it to be a very compelling puzzle, where I would rather do that than do the Wordle or something.

I do wonder if maybe it does feel much more like a hobby if you take it off the table that you’re actually going to make things. Well, actually with me — where again, if AI replaced my job and I had infinite time, was comfortable, didn’t need money or anything — I would love to learn the piano. I can’t play the piano. I would love to. That would just be fun for me. I don’t expect to be the best piano player in the world, but it’ll be fun.

So yeah, I don’t know. I think there is a more positive framing potentially, where it’s like: OK, AIs are the best at everything. However, boy, it would be nice to write these stories, solve these puzzles, play instruments that you never would have otherwise had a chance to because you were working as like the junior vice president at Pepsi, and that was your entire life. And now you get to do things that are more fun.

Elizabeth Cox: In this world, I retreat to my 16-year-old profession as a swim instructor. Teach kids to swim.

Ada [00:33:05]

Keiran Harris: All right, let’s get into Ada specifically. This is what you’ve been working on lately. This is the last couple years of your life, I guess. First of all, what is Ada?

Elizabeth Cox: Ada is an animated series where every episode is exploring what the future could be like with a different transformative technology or policy. The premise is: the main character is named Ada. She’s an assistant in a public library, recent grad, lots of ideas, nobody wants to hear them. Grumpy boss. A scenario that many of us may be familiar with.

Every episode starts and ends in her home world, in the library where she works. Then the middle is a journey through an imagined future, where she’s exploring what it would be like to live as a person in a world where the technology or policy that’s the subject of the episode exists.

So there are two visual styles to every episode: there’s her home world, and then there’s the imagined world. And the imagined world we actually changed up from episode to episode, so it’s different. We changed up the whole look for the topic, which was super fun.

Keiran Harris: How did you settle on this specific approach that you took with Ada? It sounds like you could have gone in a lot of different directions, so how did we end up with Ada?

Elizabeth Cox: I had some evidence that taking a more narrative, character-driven approach to something that could otherwise come across as very explanatory or educational or dry was a good way of getting people to engage with it.

This series I worked on for TED-Ed called The Demon of Reason, the premise of that is basically a demon in every episode explains a different logical fallacy by sort of channel surfing through his computer and teleporting into different moments in human history and correcting the errors of our ways.

But prior to that, I’d been trying to find a way to make media literacy compelling, because I think it is really compelling, and it’s super important, obviously, for understanding the news and the things people are saying to you in your life and all sorts of things.

But I had not been having good results until I hit on The Demon of Reason idea. And some of my previous attempts had been fun — like trying to gamify it, doing sort of fun meta jokes about clickbait and stuff — but they still fell pretty flat: we were not getting a lot of views, people were not sticking with them. So the difference between that stuff and how people engaged with The Demon of Reason was really stark. I think it was two or three times the views.

So that experience really made me think that there was something to a more narrative, more character-driven approach to educational stuff — that I wanted to push even further in the direction of narrative, and use a compelling protagonist who’s also kind of a host. Like, they’re the main character, but they’re also kind of a YouTuber, for lack of a better word; they’re telling you about the thing as they’re doing it. So that was the genesis of doing that for Ada.

Keiran Harris: How explicitly effective altruism-y did you want Ada to be when you got started? I don’t have a good sense of whether it was like, “I am doing this thing that’s very tied to effective altruism,” or was it like, “I’m making something that’s closer to TED-Ed work and then I’m going to introduce some EA things.” What was the vision?

Elizabeth Cox: No, it wasn’t meant to be explicitly about effective altruism, but it was also meant to be a departure from other things I’d done in the past. I think my goal was getting people to engage with weird stuff in a real way, not in a superficial or trivial way. So if it had one goal, it was that. And there’s a lot of overlap between that and things that are important in EA, but that was not really the goal. It was not meant to be an introduction to EA or convert people to EA.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. And that goal that you started off with, did that change during the writing and production process? Or did you set this as a goal and then it just was pretty consistent?

Elizabeth Cox: I think it was pretty consistent, but the approach to doing that definitely evolves from one episode to the next. That was always sort of a guiding star, was modelling this — and I think in particular, modelling sort of an exuberant spirit of inquiry. And Ada’s voice is very conversational and chatty. Actually, the vibe we were trying to get was “friends debating existential questions in a bar” rather than something more serious.

And also the premise is, should we make these technologies a reality? But the goal was never to deliver a definitive yes or no verdict on that. It’s to make the case that we should develop the policies and ethics and social structures to support them in parallel and in proportion to our investment in the technologies themselves. So it’s not trying to deliver a verdict.

Debating the merits of thinking about target audiences [00:38:03]

Keiran Harris: Tell us how you thought about setting a target audience for Ada.

Elizabeth Cox: So I define the target audience as “any curious person” — but especially people in their teens or early 20s with lots of passion, little power, and existential concerns about the world they inherit, like Ada.

But I guess ultimately, when I’m starting with an idea and arriving at the treatment for it, I don’t actually think it’s helpful to think super specifically about a target audience. For me, I am always trying to find the closest thing to a universal truth, or I guess trying to set an ambitious goal of, “If I were to do this as well as it could possibly be done, anyone would be able to relate to it.” Obviously, that’s a very ambitious goal that we’re never going to meet, but I do think that should be the starting point goal of anything. That’s how you find what’s important and meaningful, and will make people feel that the subject matter is important, or will make them feel connected to it.

Keiran Harris: So to begin with, you don’t want to be worrying too much about this specific target audience. But does that change by the time you have a final script?

Elizabeth Cox: Yes and no. I think there are some practical concerns. If you are trying to sell it to mainstream distributors, there are certain conventions where you’re really going to have a hard time doing that if you break them. For example, if you were writing a novel that you intend to be for tweens, then the protagonist can’t be 40, right? They can’t be 16. They have to be 12 or 13 or under. So in that sense, yes.

But I guess when you look at the ways people consume content, kids love stuff that’s intended for adults, or ostensibly intended for adults, all the time; and adults love stuff that’s intended for kids all the time. So I really do think that these ideas of target audience that we have, or that are setting the mandate at broadcasters or commissioners or whatever, don’t super correspond to how people actually enjoy stories. So I am fairly resistant to that.

I also think, especially for less experienced people, you can fall into a trap of defining too narrow a target audience. I think I’ve noticed this a lot with this idea of “Who is your ideal viewer? Imagine them in your head while you make the thing.” I think that’s an easy way to unintentionally justify creative choices that aren’t working. I think you can kind of talk yourself into things that don’t really work.

I also think it’s just really hard to make something while thinking about the audience. I think it just kind of doesn’t work. It breaks the magic. And it’s hard. You want to keep clarity of vision and keep steering the ship, and you don’t want things to get muddled — and thinking too much about the audience while you’re making something can do that. You have to stay connected to what you’ve identified as the most essential grain of truth in the thing, and focus on drawing that out.

So basically, I think that thinking too much about the target audience makes you think both too much and too little about pleasing people — and the results are bad.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I think that’s reasonable. But I do think that we’ve mostly been agreeing on everything up to this point, so I want to push back on this target audience not having this use. Because that was my one dominating concern as I was watching all the episodes of Ada: I just kept asking myself, I didn’t know what the answer was, who the target audience was. Which makes a lot more sense now.

But I’ll outline why this would concern me with two extremes. One would be that you went into the final script of Ada and you were like, “I intend this to be for people who have a bachelor’s degree at least in some kind of scientific discipline,” or something like that. Right? Fairly high level of knowledge going in. And in that case, it would mean that that audience would be kind of bored if you held their hands too much, so you would have to be comfortable with a bit of jargon and moving at quite a fast pace.

But on the other end, you could aim for people who, either they’re in high school, or they just went to a different profession, or really have no scientific background — in which case, you really have to define basically everything for them to be able to follow the story. And so I noticed within Ada there were times when it felt like it was flipping between this sort of audience, where there’s a tone where I’m like, “This is for younger people. Ada’s 22. Maybe it’s for people who are a bit younger than her, introducing that topic.”

But then something would happen, like there’s an episode with gene drives: I mean, you only have 10 minutes, but it was like a one-sentence explanation of gene drives and casually mentioned CRISPR. And I couldn’t help but thinking, “There is no way teenagers or people in their early 20s without experience will be able to know what this is. They don’t know what CRISPR is.”

So I just kept getting caught between being like, if we knew we were aiming for people under 20 without much of a background, I would be wanting to go through the script and putting a big red line under every piece of jargon and term and trying to define it. On the other end, if you were like, “No, this is for people who understand all that stuff,” then you can move faster.

But I felt like without having a clear target audience, you can get into this thing where the tone is for one group, but then that group might not be able to follow the concepts. And if you lose them on the concepts, then they don’t get to follow the narrative arc. This was my big concern here, and why I think at least partially thinking about target audience could be very helpful.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. Definitely the gene drives episode was, you are correct, the most difficult one to balance this stuff in. And part of that is, I think it would come up with any target audience if you’re trying to focus on the ethics of emerging technologies or technologies that don’t exist yet. Because we’re not focusing on the technical, the “how does this work” side. We’re not focusing on that; we’re focusing on the implications. But there is some amount of the “how does it work” that you have to explain.

And I’m not sure I have found the right answer to that, but I do think that is always going to be a tension and a problem — even if you do have a super well-defined target audience. That being said, definitely the gene drives one was the hardest to strip back the jargon.

On the one hand, it’s better to basically trust people to be smart and figure things out. But that’s a little reductive, obviously: if people are completely unfamiliar with topics, it doesn’t always work.

But that being said, I have consistently been surprised by how young of kids are interested in and tracking the story of things that I’ve worked on, who certainly have not encountered all the concepts in it before.

So yeah, definitely there’s tension there. I am not sure I found the right answer. I think that some of it is inherent to the subject, and I also think that some of that might be due to the format of Ada — because we’re used to educational stuff being either completely dry nonfiction or being for kids. And I do kind of think, why? That doesn’t really make sense to me. Adults like to learn things and have fun at the same time, too, so why not try that?

So there are certain senses in which it’s an experiment in format and in subject. I think some of the tensions you point out are definitely there. I am not sure that I would attach them to not having a focused-enough target audience.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that is the thing that I’m more concerned about: leaving younger people behind who would otherwise be really into it. That was where I was worried. Just it would be a shame if they sort of bounce from it a bit.

And I will say it’s actually somewhat of a similar problem I run into producing and running The 80,000 Hours Podcast. I think a lot about target audience for our episodes, and I have different target audiences for each episode, and I sort of hammer this home to the team working on it.

Because you do get these really practical things, where it’s like you’re making an episode that is specifically for people who might be able to go and work on this top-level machine learning job tomorrow: you just have to kind of accept that most people won’t be able to follow this; it’s just really technical. But in the other direction, if you want this to be for everyone who would listen to this, then I am much more likely to not really care if people who know a lot about this are going to have to sit through some definitions. That’s the more important thing.

So it did make me think that there’s this specific device you use in Ada, which I love in a lot of contexts, of having her inner monologue as she’s imagining these worlds. And it struck me that there was this inherent challenge you’ve set for yourself here, because if you’re playing at what improvisers would say “at the top of your intelligence” — so really playing out a scene as if it was really happening, basically, so it doesn’t feel like a TV show; it feels like a real conversation — well, Ada’s imagination would never need to explain anything.

She knows what CRISPR is, so it wouldn’t actually make sense for her to stop and define CRISPR if she’s imagining it, because she’s talking to herself. It would feel jarring if she then slowed down for anyone who knew less than her. Whereas if it was set up in a slightly different way — where, I don’t know, Ada had a young assistant or a cousin or something who was staying with her and was in the library with her, and everything she’s imagining, she has to explain to this 15-year-old cousin or something — then it would give you this excuse, basically, to define terms in a way that would make sense.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. I think part of trying to navigate this territory of making things more narrative while we can still learn from them is, “What feels contrived?” We definitely at some moments in Ada get around this a little bit by she is learning about a subject and we’re hearing her inner monologue as she researches or reads or learns about something. So we’re not getting a transcript of what she’s reading; we’re getting her response to it, and her, “What’s this? I have this followup question. Now I have this followup question.” But yeah, it’s definitely a little bit tricky.

Keiran Harris: Yep, totally.

Ada vs other approaches to impact-focused storytelling [00:48:18]

Keiran Harris: So I thought it would be fun to bounce a very different idea off you, and get your take.

Elizabeth Cox: OK.

Keiran Harris: You’ll have to excuse my monologue a little bit to set this up. I recorded an 80,000 Hours Podcast episode with A.J. Jacobs a few years ago. In that episode I said to him that I thought the best approach to making a high-impact TV show by our lights was probably something like: you make something like a Mad Men — same level of writing, directing, and acting and everything — but instead of it being set in Madison Avenue in the ’50s through ’70s, it’s like an Open Philanthropy-like org, so a premier grantmaking organisation, maybe in a world where effective altruism didn’t exist.

Or another idea would be you make something like a Breaking Bad, but instead of Walter White making this money for his family, he’s earning to give, planning to donate all this money to effective charities. Although I realise that a lot of listeners will think that now sounds like a much worse idea in the wake of the FTX implosion. But anyway, stay with me.

So during COVID, like many people, I had a bit of extra time, and I wrote a pilot and a 10-episode series outline for a show that I called Bequest. I ended up trying to combine elements of both of these ideas, in that the characters about halfway through the show start an Open Phil-like org, and also it’s pretty dark and violent. I’ll put up links for my script and the series outline in the show notes for anyone that is listening who would rather check out Bequest before listening to this section.

Basically, my overall thinking was that you try to make a show that’s popular independent of the message, and then if folks are super engaged, they’ll kind of helplessly learn about a lot of EA stuff. You almost can’t help but be able to pass a simple quiz on Madison Avenue in the ’60s if you’re a Mad Men fan. Actually, apparently Breaking Bad generated a surge of interest in chemistry among students, and apparently even some people started to become science bloggers, and obviously that wasn’t their intention.

But in big red letters in my mind, I thought it would be good to try and avoid, as much as you can, coming across as being preachy or overtly educational, because I felt like you’d lose a lot of people. So I’m just very curious, what do you think of that broad approach?

Elizabeth Cox: I think being preachy and being overtly educational, I wouldn’t say they’re the same thing.

Keiran Harris: No, I meant those being different things, actually. I meant:, one thing is to avoid being preachy and then there’s another thing of [being educational]. But I do separate those. So I want to be clear that I think of Ada as being educational but not preachy. Like, if you were being preachy —

Elizabeth Cox: Moralising, right?

Keiran Harris: Yeah. So it’s like the kidney donation episode would have ended with you being like, “…and if you don’t donate your kidney, you’re an ethical monster.” But you actually took pains to not be like that.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. So I think overtly educational is fine, as long as you’re not making it seem like you’re trying not to be educational, right? You have to be open about it. Actually, I think there’s more examples of this in literature and fiction than in TV and films — in part because the exposition of making things educational is a little bit easier to work in. But I think a really good example of something that’s narrative but overtly educational and intended for an adult audience is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s a great example of something that has been overtly educational, but also the point of it is fiction. So I think I agree with you on “definitely don’t be preachy.” I don’t think I agree on “don’t be educational.”

Keiran Harris: So if you’ve got this sort of portfolio of approaches to storytelling, to fiction, trying to have an impact, I was curious in your take on having both these things exist. So you have things like Ada, and then you have things more in this realm that I’m talking about.

Elizabeth Cox: I don’t think I really see impact downsides between these two approaches. I think either could be effective, and I don’t really think that it’s obvious which would be more effective, just based on that amount of information and assuming that these things are really well made, and they’re adequately supported in terms of promotion and stuff.

For me, the big risks for impact-oriented media projects, like the big failure modes, are not getting made and not getting released. The “not getting made” thing can happen at lots of phases, right? It can happen when the script isn’t made into a pilot, the pilot isn’t made into a series, the series is cancelled quickly if we’re talking about TV shows.

But also — and this has never happened to me, fortunately, so far — but a lot of my team who worked on Ada, I think almost all of them, had this experience at some time or other, that you make the movie or the show, it’s completely finished, and then it doesn’t get released because the network, or whoever owns the IP, whoever’s funding it, decides for whatever reason not to do that.

I think the risks of those things happening increase with bigger budget, prestige drama-type things, because the kind of money it takes to make these things means you’re going to be almost certainly — as the creator and the person whose incentive is impact as opposed to making money — going to be relinquishing control over the IP completely. So you don’t really have control. Many sort of perverse forces can prevent your thing from getting out into the world, even if it’s great. So I think that is the main drawback I see.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that all makes total sense to me. I was curious: you described Ada as, “The Magic School Bus, but grown up.” When you started Should We Studio, did you also have this part of the approach in mind? Like, was it always going to be “The Magic School Bus, but grown up”?

Elizabeth Cox: I don’t really remember when I came up with that as a comp [comparison] title. I think it was pretty early on. It was definitely in pre-production. And I think it’s worth noting that it is an experiment. We’ll see how it lands with people.

But I kind of had an intuition, partially based on the success of previous projects that were trying to bridge the narrative, character-driven and educational gap, that there was room for more of this kind of stuff. You know, people who have aged out of the Magic School Bus demographic still like educational stuff. Why not try it, right? I sort of have some indicators, but don’t know how it’s going to land with people yet. But it seems really worth pursuing to me and well suited to the subject matter of Ada.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally. Inasmuch as Ada will get compared to things, do you think it makes more sense to compare it to the category of TV show or to educational explainers on YouTube?

Elizabeth Cox: In terms of production value, it’s definitely a TV show, but I think there’s increasing blurring of the lines between these things. And in general, it’s very exciting to see how new formats are emerging and formats are being combined.

I think another good comparison point for Ada is The Midnight Gospel: it’s an animated show; it has a home world / imagined world sort of setup in the same way that Ada does; and then the imagined world journeys are actual podcast audio, which is funny, and there are just very psychedelic wanderings that go along with them. I think that is maybe the closest format I’ve seen to what Ada is, although substantively they’re very different.

Again, with Ada, the explanation element is not super fact-based. It’s the facts that we need to embark on these ethical questions. But I think a lot of explainer video-type things are more breaking the facts of events or scientific concepts or whatever it may be down.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. With Bequest, I was trying to make it very dark and adult, with the idea being that you’re trying to reach as many people as you can, but only expecting, I don’t know, 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% of people would actually pick up on these important ideas. But it feels like with Ada, you’re aiming for a higher percentage of people to come away really thinking about stuff differently, and then maybe taking a hit on the total audience. Does that sound about right?

Elizabeth Cox: Mmm, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think of it in those terms, or like that as a particular tradeoff was on my mind. I think I was going into it very aware that I’d want to make sure the thing can be good, and equally as importantly, that it can get into the world — and less so about relative percentages of different types of storytelling, of who might take a message away.

But I do think overtly educational stuff can reach huge audiences. The Magic School Bus is a prime example of that. It’s one of the most beloved TV shows ever, which is not at all to say that that’s going to happen to Ada. So I would say I was not thinking of it in those terms.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. So you talked a bit about how you were very conscious of making sure that you were giving yourself the best chance of getting something made. I suppose there’s two ways you can think about this.

One would be, “I want to maximise my chances of getting it made, and then from that point I get to have some impact.” Or you could have the broader thing, where you’re like, “I want to maximise the expected value of this show. I’m going to swing for the fences, and that’s going to include a big chance that it will never get made. But if it does get made, it’ll have this big impact.”

Did you think about that at all in terms of the higher-risk versus lower-risk approaches to having an impact?

Elizabeth Cox: I think I would have approached it differently. To me, the scarier thing is it gets made and nobody ever sees it — because that’s so much more of an investment of time and effort than it doesn’t get made.

When I started Should We Studio, and I was talking to advisors about how to approach pitching Ada to distributors, a few of them were like, “Why don’t you just keep pitching shows until something sticks, and just spend all the money doing that? That’s what I would do.” And others were like, “Are you kidding? This is a super rare opportunity to have the financing to actually make the whole thing yourself and retain creative control in that way. Just do it and then figure out the distribution later.” And I ended up going with the latter, but I’m not sure there is a right or wrong answer there.

I guess the thing I will say about the swing-for-the-fences approach is that what ends up getting made through those kind of pathways, it’s not necessarily a meritocracy, right? It’s not like you maximise your chances of it getting picked up by making it as good as possible. I think even taking out aiming for impact in the entertainment industry, there is a very weird dynamic where creative people want to make art, but the decision makers are trying to make money. So there’s already like this big friction going on, and that’s even before you get into trying to generate impact.

So I guess I would say that’s a reservation about the swing-for-the-fences approach: obviously nothing is a perfect, or maybe even close-to-perfect, meritocracy, but I think it’s even less so than some other things.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally makes sense. Do you have a take on whether it’s OK to have antiheroes, or even genuinely evil characters, in a story that’s supposed to be about doing good?

Elizabeth Cox: Yes. OK, and encouraged. Seriously though, I don’t think anything is out of bounds. And actually, I think that morally grey characters or even outright evil characters are very important for getting into our mindsets and our public consciousness the murkiness of situations, and the fact that nothing is ever all good or bad.

And the kind of stories that have been told in TV and movies — and other mediums as well, increasingly — over the past 20 years or so actually do kind of affect the way that people think. Or at least have affected the way I think about interpreting situations and people’s actions, and the intertangled threads of “good” and “evil.” So I actually think it’s super valuable to have that stuff in things that are trying to do good.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, agree.

Why animation? [01:01:06]

Keiran Harris: So let’s turn to animation: why does Should We Studio focus on animation in particular?

Elizabeth Cox: Well, first of all, we’re making stuff about the future and worlds that don’t exist yet. Animation is a medium that lets you invent a world completely from scratch, every single thing in it, which I find super exciting and I think lends itself really well to work about the future or alternative futures or imagination.

My personal attachment to animation: my whole career so far, pretty much, has been in animation. And the reason for that is that I came to it through a fine art background, drawing and painting, as opposed to through a film background. So the artistry was always the thing that got me most excited.

I think with still drawings and paintings, I eventually realised that the thing that was most compelling to me about visual art was the opportunity to tell a story. And the amount of story you can tell in a single painting is kind of limited. Art historians are going to come for me, but I think it’s true.

So that was how I found my way to animation. Just the variety and diversity of looks and techniques within animation are super exciting. I’m just also really drawn to sort of wacky stuff, to weirdness and joy and cheekiness, and I think it lends itself really well to that as a medium.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally agree.

Elizabeth Cox: There are also reasons it’s good for educational stuff specifically. If you’re trying to be explanatory, it’s easy to add a layer of information density without it feeling more dense to the viewer.

I also think that at its best, educational animated stuff is not doing what we call “show and say,” which is the visuals exactly repeat what’s in the words. You’re using visual humour and visual metaphors to sort of complement the words. And I’ve always been sort of drawn to visual puns. I’m outing myself as a giant nerd here, but the ancient Egyptians used to do hieroglyphic puns, using the shape of the hieroglyphs to make little jokes. And same with illuminated manuscripts: there’s all this subtext annotated into them that’s just hilarious. It’s a whole other story. So that kind of humour is very exciting to me.

Keiran Harris: Have you come across any major drawbacks to animation as a medium, especially if your ultimate goal is impact?

Elizabeth Cox: It’s slow, so I don’t think it’s the best medium for breaking news. I see that as the biggest drawback: it’s hard to react quickly to things.

It’s also expensive, but it’s interesting because it’s expensive for a super low-budget indie. But if you’re trying to make really beautiful sci-fi fantasy second world stuff, it is much cheaper or much more feasible on an indie budget than it would be to do that live action and have all those visual effects. So that is both a pro and a con.

And also prejudice: I think definitely some people still see animation as for kids, even though that has never been the case. And I think for even some distributors and commissioners, an animated project has to fit into the bucket of for kids or the raunchy, shock humour, adult cartoons type of thing: it has to be one or the other. But really, animation’s a medium; it’s not a genre. It can be applied to any genre equally effectively.

So that’s a frustration. I don’t think it’s a drawback of animation, but it is a drawback of trying to sell animation, so maybe to try to create impact through animation.

Keiran Harris: That’s a great point.

One Billion Christmases [01:04:54]

Keiran Harris: OK, so I want to get your thoughts on this, and I did send it to you before recording. So I came up with an idea for a longtermist Christmas movie, and I’ll share it here just in case it’s fun.

Basically it’s where Christmas is a foreign aid programme of the North Pole government. So it’s like charity for the rest of the world. But Santa is a longtermist, and he’s mostly motivated by making sure that kids in the future — thousands, millions, even billions of years in the future — they’ll all get to enjoy wonderful Christmases.

Our story revolves around four kids who all need to save future Christmases. The hope is that once these characters and the audience care about future kids getting presents, then they’ll have to admit that they care about future lives generally.

So I had this Christmas variation of Will MacAskill’s basic case for longtermism, which he gave on our show a couple years ago. There’s four points to it:

  1. Kids who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration. That seems pretty straightforward.
  2. The future could be very big and/or very long. That’s actually just exactly Will’s point.
  3. We can reasonably hope to influence whether kids in the future get Christmas presents, and how good or bad their presents are.
  4. So trying to make sure Christmas exists for future generations is a key priority of the holiday season.

That is my four-step case for Christmas longtermism.

And part of my thinking with this was that the most successful Christmas movies get replayed
every year. So even though it’s this big long shot, we were talking about high risk stuff before: if you could create just one of the 10 Christmas movies that gets replayed over and over again, and it happened to have these longtermist themes, and then kids just grew up with this being more normalised or less weird, that felt to me like it would be kind of a big deal.

And actually, I have no idea what you thought about this. What was your reaction to this idea?

Elizabeth Cox: Big picture: I think it’s diabolical, and I love a Trojan horse. And now I’m like, someone needs to apply this to writing a series of horny romance novels or something. That would be awesome and hilarious. So I like the direction you’re going with that.

This is going to be annoying, but for the actual idea you propose, I think there’s like a slight mismatch between content and target audience. [laughs]

Keiran Harris: Oh, yeah. Here we go.

Elizabeth Cox: I think I might be misremembering parts of it, but there was an election and a voting situation and that kind of conflict. So that, plus the foreign aid programme idea, feels older than the “child protagonist saving Christmas” idea. And I don’t know how to reconcile it. I think it’s possible for sure, but I would be curious.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I love it that you’re admitting everything I say about target audiences. That is satisfying. That’s the only reason I wrote this, was to prove a point.

No, I think that’s very fair, and definitely a challenge. I haven’t actually written the script for this, just an outline. But in defence of this idea, I do think if you run down the most popular Christmas movies, they appeal to both kids and adults. I mean, if you take something like Home Alone — which, by the way, I still watch Home Alone every year with my wife —

Elizabeth Cox: Oh, so now you’re defending my idea about target audience.

Keiran Harris: Yeah I don’t know if it’s that I think that people give Christmas movies more of a break or something… I don’t know what’s going on. But it’s a good point that you raise, and that I do think there’s something about the Christmas — this is going to sound very comically holiday-y — “there is something about the Christmas season” where I think people are more up for giving stories a bit more leeway. To be more like kids, I think.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. They’re full and bored and the weather’s bad.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I kind of do think that there are different rules, a bit. Like it is December 23 and the tree’s up and we’re eating these sugar cookies. Yeah, there’s something about that where you’re not really looking to watch Mad Men on December 23, start that with the family, you know? I mean, I would do that.

Elizabeth Cox: Also though, I do think you’re definitely onto something, because the sort of simpler version of what you’re describing is A Christmas Carol — which is maybe the best known Christmas story ever.

Keiran Harris: Yep. Any other takes on, even if this specific one wouldn’t have landed, the idea of Should We Studio making an animated Christmas movie one day?

Elizabeth Cox: No I don’t want to make a Christmas movie. But I think it’s a great idea, and someone should do it.

Keiran Harris: Totally makes sense.

How storytelling can humanise [01:09:34]

Keiran Harris: So I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that films and TV shows can inform people about a topic that they don’t know much about going in. There’s this other way that stories can have a real impact for me, which is humanising people in groups. I think it could be very good, very effective there. I think one great example is the movie Philadelphia from the ’90s, which is where Tom Hanks won the best actor award for the Oscars for playing a gay man who gets fired from his job for having AIDS. And, yeah, that apparently seems to have a real effect of people being like, “These people are just people, and I don’t have to be terrified of this disease I don’t know anything about.”

Does that align with your view, that it really can have this very powerful role in reducing prejudice, humanising groups?

Elizabeth Cox: Definitely. And Dallas Buyers Club comes to mind as a 2010s update on that, which is more nuanced specifically to humanising different people who might have AIDS. Yeah, I definitely agree with that.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, it got me thinking. Is there something that we — universal “we,” doesn’t have to be us, but maybe us — could do in a kind of effective altruism-ish category?

It feels like digital minds are really one group, which maybe Westworld has covered partially. But trying to anticipate this problem of like, it is plausible we will build digital minds that are at least plausibly conscious, and there will be trillions of them, and they will have rich lives, and also it’ll be very possible to torture them. This seems like a very scary thing, but right now I think almost no one would care about them as a group. So it’s possible that’s one.

And then I was also wondering if there’s some masterpiece waiting to be made about future generations where it’s like, can you get people to care about future generations? I’ve played around with this idea, where you have two timelines: one is a base reality where people are trying to reduce x-risks in some way — maybe they’re trying to prevent a pandemic — and then you’re simultaneously playing this other timeline where you have just a family, and it’s just a story that might just exist on its own, that you just really care about these people.

And you have this link where it’s like, well, if person A doesn’t stop the world from ending in this timeline, the family in timeline B won’t get to exist. And now you really care about them. And it turns out that even though they’re 200 years in the future, they’re still people.

I don’t know if that exists yet, but it feels both very hard, but also a bit tantalising. Where it’s this thing that seems to a lot of people in the effective altruism community as being fairly straightforward of like, “You should care about people even if they’re born 500 years in the future.” It does feel like that’s not something that has landed widely yet. Any reaction to that?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, I think one of the things about both of those subjects you mentioned that is tricky in a narrative film format, and especially like a mass market formulaic — I don’t mean that in a bad way, but like, hero’s journey-type storyline — is the numbers element of it. I think for both digital minds and future generations, the sheer number of people that could exist is part of what makes those compelling. And that is hard to figure out for a character-driven story in the scope of a film. Maybe it’s better for a really big novel.

I had, I’m not gonna say half-baked, but maybe like a one-sixteenth baked idea along those lines. Which is this question of: would you want to live through all the suffering that’s ever happened and all the good stuff that’s ever happened, or not exist? To me, that feels like it could be a really fun speculative fiction film. Maybe “fun” is the wrong word.

Keiran Harris: No, I’m with you.

But can storytelling actually change strongly held opinions? [01:13:26]

Keiran Harris: So I think, again, that’s a pretty uncontroversial category. I think people will be on board with this.

But I want to challenge storytelling a bit more by looking at some harder cases. I’m wondering if we think that TV shows and films are capable of changing really strongly held opinions, where the viewer had the exact opposite view going in.

Starting with you personally, can you think of an example where a TV show or movie actually changed your mind about something very specific? An example would be, “I passionately thought that nuclear power was dangerous, and I campaigned against it or something. And then I watched this movie and it totally changed my mind.” Do you have anything that lands in that category?

Elizabeth Cox: I don’t think so.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. I was trying to think about this too, and I don’t know that I have any good examples either. But if you had asked me a week ago is that possible, maybe I would have been like, “Sure.”

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. So I think the reason neither of us is coming up with an example of a film that’s caused a complete flip on a deeply entrenched position for us is that that is something that’s really hard to do, period — in any form of media or conversation or persuasive technique. I think the situations in which it’s possible to change people’s minds when they’re really convinced they’re right about something, is if people are operating from the same starting set of facts or beliefs. And I think in some of the examples you name, or the ones we’re trying to think of, that’s very much not the case.

But that does link back to what I think is the most powerful purpose of films and TV and other stories for creating impact: to basically bring things into people’s awareness that weren’t there before, and start updating our set of values or beliefs or ways of thinking about certain things.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, I agree. This is what inspired me to think this was plausible at all. Take effective altruism: most people in the world who would be really sympathetic to effective altruism have never heard of it. They’ve never heard of the concept. They’ve never heard these questions. You know, there was a pilot or a study that was done a few years ago, where even people in top US colleges mostly have never heard of these ideas, even though they really want to do good in the world. So for me it seemed like a very clear way of impact is just getting these core ideas in front of people who might be naturally inclined to them, who otherwise will never see it.

To use my own example, I was a professional poker player before I heard of EA. And when I heard of EA, I was just immediately on board with it. It took literally two minutes, just like, that’s just for me. It’s almost like you could describe EA to all poker players as it’s just a poker player’s approach to charity — because it’s the same thing in terms of thinking about everything in terms of expected value. So if there was a good EA-ish movie in 2005 or something, I would have just been an EA in 2005, but I didn’t hear about it until 2016.

So it just feels like there is this room where you don’t necessarily have to be even trying to have these big, impossible mind-change things — which, as you say, you can spend 100 hours with someone and not even move the needle and change their mind on a deeply entrenched issue. But just if it’s like, “I have never heard of the idea that you can compare causes and interventions. That’s a reasonable thing to do. And now I’ve heard of it, and now it makes sense to me.” Any reaction to all of that?

Elizabeth Cox: I think that’s what excites me about making things for general audiences is the sheer size of the possible audience as opposed to doing things that are more niche or intended not to reach a lot of people. So I totally agree, and I think that’s a lot of the exciting possibility. I think it’s kind of sad because the feedback, like whether you’ve done that or not, is pretty hard to get.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. It would have this massive lag, where it’s like, eventually, nine years later, someone changed their career. And then maybe they do a podcast on it and they’re tracing back. You know, the people who made that short film you’re talking about, they presumably, unless you’ve met them, have no idea that they had this huge impact on your life.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, exactly.

Keiran Harris: But maybe they would now, nine years later, hear this and be like, “Wow, I had, like, a big positive impact on the world” — because they have this counterfactual responsibility for everything Elizabeth does.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. And I think that is the weird thing about pursuing storytelling to, grandiose as it sounds, “make the world a better place” — because I think everyone can point to books and movies and whatever that really were really formative for you. But none of the people who made those things — unless you wrote them a letter when you were a super passionate young person or whatever — they probably don’t know. So it’s just this very weird thing where we have this intuition that it matters, but the actual evidence of it is kind of thin on the ground.

Novels and short stories [01:18:38]

Keiran Harris: OK, so let’s now turn to other ways of storytelling besides TV and movies. I know you’re keen to talk about this. Any take on, as opposed to TV and movies, how promising novels or short stories are as a path to impact?

Elizabeth Cox: I think novels and short stories are extremely promising as a path to impact. In terms of directly comparing them to TV and movies, one obvious thing is they’re much cheaper experiments. It’s a reduction to say that one person writes a book, but pretty much one person writes a book, and it’s cheap: it’s just the cost of one person’s time compared to the operational lift of a film or TV series.

But I do think that in order to fully enter the canon over the long term, to be canonised or to become cultural memes or stories that get repeated and adapted over and over again, books usually do have to become movies or TV shows. So that’s sort of how I see those things interacting.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally. Just from a writer’s perspective, we were earlier talking about this balance between wanting to make something that’ll actually get made and maybe doing the highest-impact thing. But there’s something very appealing to just writing a book and then it already existing. You finish your book, and now maybe it’s not published, maybe it’s not in a store yet, but you can send that text to people, and be like, “That’s my book.”

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. Also, this is very much a known strategy. Lots of people write novels for this reason. But one thing I will say is that although traditional publishing is not known as a meritocracy, there is a path for making cold submissions that actually leads to people getting represented and their books being published — which you can’t say about TV and film; there’s no sort of cold submissions process for that. [With one cool exception: the Black List! —EC] So it is a little bit more accessible without the secret Rolodex and etiquette and all that stuff.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that seems right. Do you know if that’s available to people internationally? Like, if you’re in India and you write a brilliant novel and you want to reach out to American publishing houses, is that a thing? Or is it like, you have to be American?

Elizabeth Cox: No, you don’t have to be American. India is an interesting example because a lot of people will be writing in English, which is a big barrier. So I think a lot of mostly US and UK, but Canadian, Israeli, whatever — agents will represent people from anywhere. Which is not to say they actually, in practice, do, but…

Keiran Harris: Yeah, right. Separate question. But yeah, they’re not immediately turned away. What’s your top example of a novel or a short story that changed your mind about something important?

Elizabeth Cox: I think my personal examples are a little bit weird and meta, because the ones that most stick out, the thing they taught me about was storytelling or writing.

So for me, the one that sticks out most of all is Moby Dick. I had to read it in high school, and a lot of people were very upset about this. But from like page one, I was like, “This book is speaking directly to me. This book was written for me.” And that experience, I can’t really think of anything else that compares to it. But I think what I took away from that was mostly sort of a roadmap for how to be a writer, and the sort of wacky, inquisitive, tangential… I mean, there’s a line in it that’s like, “We’re going to explore the whole universe, not excluding the suburbs” — and that is very much, in a sentence, what sort of got me about it.

It also convinced me that as an adult, I should live by the sea if I wanted to be happy. And that transpired. I have actioned that, which is kind of goofy.

But I also have kind of a bad example, of a book really influencing me in a way that I think was bad. Around the same age, like 15, 16, I picked up Atlas Shrugged. And the individualism of it really appealed to me in those kind of teenage years.

Keiran Harris: Formative stages.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, exactly. It’s like when you’re trying to separate yourself from your parents or people around you and forge your own path — and you haven’t really come to appreciate the importance of the collective yet, shall we say.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that’ll do it. If you grow up in a liberal household and you get into Ayn Rand.

Elizabeth Cox: Or had any sort of exposure to political ideologies in practice. So I definitely got deprogrammed a few years later on that, but that definitely had a powerful and I think negative impact on me when I first read it at a sort of suggestible age. So yeah, there’s cautionary tales too.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. Nice. Do you think if you were just going to sum all of the pieces of fiction stories that have had an impact on you over your life, do books just easily beat TV shows and movies?

Elizabeth Cox: I think I’ve been interested in books for longer, and I also went through a period of about five or 10 years where I only read nonfiction, and did not read fiction or watch TV at all because I just found it too addictive. I just like stories too much. So that’s also probably part of it.

But I think some of the things that have most profoundly inspired or impacted me are just very weird animated short films. To me, that’s a pretty ideal medium, but definitely books and short stories over the course of my life. There’s probably more examples.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. So as a visual artist too, is it true that writing a novel just is personally a lot less appealing to you as an idea, versus making animated movies or TV shows?

Elizabeth Cox: Not at all. In fact, the idea of being able to sit in a room by myself… Like, the collaborative aspect of making a film or a series is really awesome and inspiring, but it’s also fairly draining over the course of a production to be balancing and working with a lot of other people. And I’m kind of an introvert, so yeah, writing a novel sounds great.

Creative nonfiction [01:25:06]

Keiran Harris: How do you think novels and short stories compare to creative nonfiction?

Elizabeth Cox: I think the things that make them really good and really memorable and have a positive impact are kind of the same things. I think the best creative nonfiction feels, in a way, like fiction: it’s lyrical, it’s empathetic, and it’s sort of accessing some of those universally relatable things — emotions or experiences or whatever — that fiction does.

For me, the example that stands out the most, maybe potentially more influential than any of the other personal influences I’ve talked about, is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is a book by Oliver Sacks. He was a physician and neurologist, and it’s case studies in weird neurological phenomena.

And at the age that I encountered this book, I think it was sort of indistinguishable from fiction for me. I don’t even think I read it by myself; I think my dad read it aloud to me. But that, for me, sparked a lifelong interest in neuroscience that translated into actually what my degree was in college. I obviously did not become a scientist or a doctor, so take that impact story with a grain of salt, but yeah.

And interestingly, Sacks had a kind of similar — well, not similar, because I’m not putting myself with him — but had a creative nonfiction origin story where, and this is not recommended, but basically on a giant amphetamine bender, he read a 500-page book in one night by a Victorian doctor that was describing cases he had worked on, and it was just very evocative and transporting.

And that gave him the inspiration that was like, “Oh, this is what I should do.” Because he’d been kind of struggling with his research, and thinking he actually wasn’t cut out for research, and sort of having a crisis of that kind. Then, obviously, he became one of the most notable people ever to do that. So I thought that was kind of a cool impact story, although it does not relate to me personally.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that’s great. Tell us about another one of your favourites.

Elizabeth Cox: Once again, environmentalism and climate change, there’s some really illustrative examples here in terms of something that did get into the public consciousness. My favourite story from there is Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. It was published in 1962, but at the time she wrote it, the USDA and everyone was super hyped on pesticides — “These are great; they make the crops grow” — and she investigated the harms of pesticides, and how they were creating resistant pests that then led to stronger pesticides that then led to this vicious cycle, and how birds and other non-target species and even humans were being harmed by this.

And her book just blew up. But the reason it blew up was because it was so lyrical and poetic, and tugging on those heartstrings of how we feel about the natural world. Even the title, Silent Spring, comes from this idea that all the birds have been killed by pesticides, so there’s no birdsong. So it has this cool, lyrical thing going on.

But that book led pretty directly to the founding of the [Environmental Protection Agency] — which is super cool, and I think a really clear impact story. Also cool because at that time, environmentalism was new enough not to become a partisan thing yet, so the EPA was founded under the Nixon administration — which is kind of an interesting tidbit, talking about the murky threads of good and evil.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, yeah. That would have been nice if we could have held up on that.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, for sure. And then just to give a recent example of different approaches to creative nonfiction, two books that came out within a year of each other, one was The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and one was Trick Mirror.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a doorstop: it’s a very long, sort of dry nonfiction book. And then Trick Mirror is a collection of personal essays. And they’re both kind of about the same thing: the commodification of personal data over the last decade or two by big tech companies, and the failures to get ahead of that with legislation and regulation. So same idea, two totally different approaches.

Actually, the doorstop, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, sold really well for that kind of book, and the term “surveillance capitalism” kind of became a meme that people understand. But the reach of Trick Mirror — which has basically the same takeaway, but is told in a more digestible, accessible way — just really blew up. It was everywhere. Obama put it on his list and just tonnes and tonnes of people read it.

These books came out like six months apart, so that’s just a really cool comparison of different techniques to nonfiction for generating impact and awareness of something that had been sneakily going on. But maybe the threads hadn’t sort of coalesced into, “This is happening to people.” I think the reason both of these books struck such a chord was that probably a lot of elements of them people had felt personally, but hadn’t really put it together into the bigger picture. So that’s just another cool nonfiction story.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that’s great.

Other promising ways of storytelling [01:30:53]

Keiran Harris: Did you want to talk about any other promising ways of storytelling when your goal is having an impact? Graphic novels, podcasts, Broadway musicals, anything that comes to mind?

Elizabeth Cox: I think one that’s kind of interesting to me and weird is advice columns. I started reading a lot of them when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I think they just profoundly and positively impacted the way I relate to other people and the way I manage my own emotions.

They’re kind of interesting because they’re totally anonymised. Some of them are made up, and some of them are the plots of famous books that the columnists and their editor don’t catch, which is hilarious when that happens. So they are, for all intents and purposes, fiction. And it’s just a silly, sort of voyeuristic thing that people like, but something that I think actually has a lot of value — or can have a lot of value — in terms of shaping how people treat each other. So I don’t know what can be done with that. But that’s one that I’ve always kind of thought about.

Keiran Harris: Very cool. Any others stand out?

Elizabeth Cox: I guess this is not a particular format, but I think the key to the most impactful or the most lasting stories is that they get adapted into many different formats. We were talking about A Christmas Carol earlier, and I don’t think a lot of people realise that that originates with Dickens, right? They’ve got, like, The Muppet Christmas Carol or whatever, pick your film adaptation. But there are so many things that become cultural shorthand or become known stories, and just thinking about how things sort of get into the water supply and never die is interesting.

One phenomenon that’s really interesting to me is Jane Austen adaptations, because the plots of her books are pretty basic, but the fans are rabid, and that’s down to the prose of the originals. But it makes people interested in having infinite adaptations that do not have that element of the originals, but retain the basic plot. So that is super interesting to me, and I think there’s got to be some clever way of turning that into storytelling for impact.

How did Ada actually get made? [01:33:23]

Keiran Harris: So getting back to Ada, how did Ada actually get made? Would you be up for breaking down, step by step, how you actually went from the idea for Ada to the final release?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah.The initial pitch for Ada was fairly simple. There was a lot of work to be done — starting with just defining the character, defining the setting, and then from there, defining what the tone and visual style would be.

So in pre-production, we had a long phase of research and references. The first thing I focused on was who this character of Ada was going to be. I had this vague idea that she might be based on Ada Lovelace — who is, by many people, considered to have articulated the first description of artificial intelligence, but was also just sort of a wacky, misunderstood character. I think Ada in Ada is also a little bit that way — you know, hopefully not meeting such a tragic end.

So I started looking at other historical figures and how we could pull elements for both the personality and the look of this character.

Another inspiration was Qiu Jin, who was a Chinese revolutionary and feminist poet who was executed by the state quite young for her revolutionary activities. But she has this amazing portrait that’s super formal — seated, formal clothes, formal hair — and then she’s just holding an unsheathed dagger in her lap, which I thought is just the most amazing portrait ever. So her hairstyle and vibe went into the character of Ada too, as well as that energy of revolutionary activity with sort of fashionable flair that I thought was really fun.

Then the final reference for Ada was Sor Juana, who was a Mexican nun during the Inquisition. The reason she became a nun was because she was very interested in math and philosophy and drama, writing poems and plays and stuff. But the only way to pursue that at the time was to become a nun, so she became a nun. Eventually, her stuff became too outrageous and outspoken and progressive, so the Catholic church made her stop doing all her stuff but renew her vows. And as a protest, she renewed her vows in her own blood, like signed all this stuff in her own blood. So I really like that energy.

I think all three of these people had a lot of character and passion, but also there’s a loneliness and a being misunderstood and a compromise in their stories. Ada in the series does not have anything as trying of circumstances, but bringing a little bit of that feeling I think people relate to into her character too.

And then for the setting, Ada‘s set in a library. That’s the homeworld she starts and returns to in every episode. That setting was not part of the original pitch, but it seemed just like a very natural fit, because I was thinking about libraries of history and literature. So the Library of Alexandria, where the goal was to get all the knowledge in the world into one place, and also the library in the short story “The Library of Babel,” which is an infinite library — or effectively infinite: it contains a book with every possible combination of letters. Most of them are nonsense, but there’s some gems in there, but you could spend your whole life looking for them.

So I think that these ideas — that as your knowledge increases the ability to navigate, it becomes more important, and especially the ability to make connections between seemingly disparate subjects that are sort of intimately related — I think that idea was very connected to the subject matter of Ada. That’s kind of what ethics is, in a way. Or at least when we’re trying to plan for the future and predict the future, it’s like pulling from things that seem unrelated and making sense of them.

And it’s also just related to our times. You know, we’re on the internet. The librarians are bad: they’re reinforcing our preconceptions instead of leading us on to new things. And by “the librarians are bad,” I mean the YouTube algorithm and stuff.

So we had the character, we had the setting. Tonally, I think there is a lot of cool speculative fiction in the form of novels that is aesthetically distinct from the tropes of science fiction. So I was looking at work by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson that sort of have this quality.

When I read The Handmaid’s Tale — I think what really struck me about it was that obviously, it’s very dystopian, but it did not have “dystopian vibes.” It was very much the inner experience of someone whose day to day mostly consisted of staring at a wall punctuated by terror and grief. But a lot of it was descriptions of the colours she’s seeing and the sensations she’s having. And I thought that quality is really cool and really distinct from a lot of what we see in dystopian or futuristic works.

And same for those other authors I listed: all have an element of that. The Left Hand of Darkness is inarguably sci-fi — an emissary goes to another planet to observe their culture — but it’s all about the weather, you know? It’s just like snow and romantic vibes. It’s very interesting. It has this mediaeval feel, even though it’s visiting other planets in the future.

So yeah, just kind of drawing from all of that, and then figuring out how to translate that into a look that would feel handmade, and lush, and kind of intimate too, I guess. So in terms of visual references, we were looking at a lot of Cartoon Saloon films — like Wolfwalkers and Song of the Sea — which have this highly illustrated style and this really fun shape design of really bulbous, exaggerated shapes. As well as some of the concept art from Samurai Jack, which obviously combines future and past, and has these very vivid landscapes with very exaggerated shapes. So looking at references like that and trying to find a version of that that we could do with our budget.

Also, I knew I wanted it to be super chatty, but I think super voiceover-driven films are kind of polarising. There’s a lot of people who think that that is just bad and you shouldn’t do it. I completely disagree, but I was studying up on the films that are like that that I love to see how they did it and how we could translate that into an educational voice.

So The Danish Poet, which is an animated short that actually won an Oscar, was a big inspiration there.

The next and less fun part is to come up with a pipeline where we’re going to be able to do this with the time and money we have. And I think animation is a lot more technical of a process than people realise. We went with 3D animation for the characters and 2D illustrated backgrounds that were painted in Photoshop.

The way 3D character animation works is basically you go from a drawing, a character design, to essentially sculpting it inside the computer. Making what’s called a 3D model, but then you have to build it a skeleton, apply constraints to the skeleton — so the knees bend the right way and stuff, apply weights to the skin so the right joints tug on the skin in the right way — and then build an interface; that is, controls for someone to actually use that and animate it. So all this knowledge of anatomy and physics and stuff like that goes into it.

We decided on this 3D pipeline for the characters, because a more traditional style — where you redraw the characters every frame — is just a lot slower. It’s also difficult to keep consistent with a group of different animators, especially because most animators now, even who work in that style, are not used to doing it in that way and staying on model and keeping the volume of the limbs and the line of the stroke and stuff consistent.

So there was a lot of pipeline dev work that happened before we went into production. And in parallel to that, I was drafting scripts and figuring out how long they should be, what the vibes were going to be, all that kind of stuff. A lot of the scripts I drafted in that period did not become episodes, or were heavily edited before they became episodes.

But in order to go into production, what we needed was a locked script of episode one. This is a big difference between animation and live action: it’s not coming together in the editing phase. You really want every shot carefully defined up front, because every second of animation is expensive, and you don’t want to be doing stuff that you don’t need. It’s not like you can just shoot a bunch of B-roll and mess around with it later. You really don’t want to be doing that.

Keiran Harris: Not so much improvising on the set from actors in an animated movie.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, yeah, no improvising. Although, still more improvising than maybe we would like. Because with every step of the process — you go from the script, to the recorded audio, to a storyboard, to a roughly blocked animation, to a complete animation — and with every one of those major steps, it adds another layer of interpretation that makes you see the story in a different way, or see other elements that aren’t working, because each time it’s a different person.

Keiran Harris: So audio before the storyboard?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah.

Keiran Harris: Oh, that’s interesting. I would have guessed the other way around.

Elizabeth Cox: Well, kind of in parallel. Once the script is locked, we would start doing a rough pass of the storyboard in parallel to recording the audio and making selections from the takes. And I say “locked script,” but especially in the first episode, I was rewriting a lot of lines kind of on the fly in the recording session, because when the actor says them, they come to life in a different way.

But it’s really important to get the audio and the selects done, because it doesn’t really come together until you put those rough storyboard thumbnails to the audio and start figuring out the timing. And that’s what we call a boardomatic: it’s just the storyboard set to the timing.

And at that very rough stage, that is when we would show it to the larger team, like the animators and the illustrators, and get their reactions to it — like what parts weren’t clear — and then go back and really refine the storyboards. You really want every shot to be defined in the storyboards. You want someone to be able to interpret the emotion, the character’s pose, where the camera is, how close it is, all that kind of stuff. Because again, with animation, because it’s expensive, you’re trying to catch issues at as early a stage as possible, so you don’t go directly from there to fully animating it.

First, you do a blocking pass, which is just like, where are the characters? Where’s the camera? Maybe one or two poses, and then try to catch as many things as possible there. Or if someone’s confused about what the emotion should be in a scene or in a shot, try to figure that out there. Then from there, you go on to a complete character animation pass.

The other thing to note is that you have to make absolutely everything that’s going to appear. So with each episode, once that script is getting close to final, we’re making a list of props and characters that we don’t have, and those are being modelled in 3D. We’re making a list of the backgrounds we need, which are being painted in 2D, and kind of proceeding from there.

So we’re updating the edit with new shots every day, because, again, trying to catch any timing issues that come. And also we’re on a really tight schedule. We had like eight or nine weeks for animation for every episode, which is probably a number that’s kind of meaningless if you don’t work in animation. But what that translated to was the highest daily quota of seconds of animation that any of our animators had ever worked with. So it was super important to track every day what was being done, because even things going a little astray could lead to big costs and delays.

But once the animation is all finished, you’re still looking at something that’s not pretty, because it hasn’t been rendered and composited. That process of rendering from 3D is translating the model to a final look and feel. And that can mean different things: it can be super realistic or super simple; it can have lighting and shadow and all these different passes. But we went with a really simple, flat colour and no lighting from 3D, because we wanted it to have that closer to traditional 2D feel.

Then at that point, you have to put it all together with the backgrounds and little effects and things. That’s called compositing. And then finally we have the timings locked. Hopefully it’s locked before this. And that’s the point at which sound design and music can take place.

Keiran Harris: Wow. I mean, from my perspective, it looks beautiful. I’m hoping, given all that work, you’re very happy with how it came out?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. I mean, I’m already like, “the next thing’s going to be so much better,” but yeah, I am super happy with how it came out.

Keiran Harris: It does seem especially hard to remove yourself to the point of someone seeing it for the first time when you are spending so much time on every second of this thing, being so immersed in it.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. Definitely that was kind of my job, was to keep track of the big picture and ways in which we were possibly straying from the creative vision, because I wasn’t as deeply in the weeds. I was not animating shots myself, so that helps keep some degree of perspective.

And also, we would start one phase for the next episode as soon as it was done for each episode. So I would be working on like three episodes at once. I’d be writing one, giving intensive feedback on the storyboarding of one, and reviewing the later stages of animating on another. So it was kind of a lot to float around in the brain at one time.

Keiran Harris: Right. Yeah. So you directed these episodes too, right?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah.

Keiran Harris: Does that encompass storyboarding and giving direction to the actors?

Elizabeth Cox: I did not do any storyboarding, no. But the reviewing of the storyboards was super intensive, and where we were making a lot of decisions about the story, sometimes going back and tweaking the script — which was something I really wanted to make sure we did, because I think it works best when the two are informing each other instead of just getting passed on from phase to phase without any dialogue, which is sometimes how things end up being produced just because of various constraints.

The hardest part of the process for Elizabeth [01:48:28]

Keiran Harris: What’s been the hardest part of this whole process for you personally?

Elizabeth Cox: For me personally, definitely managing creative work and the business and management end. I think just because doing good creative work takes a lot of time and space. And yes, you can block X hours a day to work on this. A lot of times what you need to do is block a whole day and fuck around and pace and lie on your bed and just let it percolate. And that is just wildly incompatible with managing a brand new organisation.

Keiran Harris: With running the studio.

Elizabeth Cox: Both from the people and fundraising and relationship management aspects.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. Obviously there’s a funding constraint, but if you could, it feels like it’s at least two jobs, right? Or ideally.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, definitely. Well, first of all, I should say our production manager was doing an amazing job of tracking the budget and paying the contractors and figuring out all our project management stuff. I was not doing any of that stuff hands on. But I think even just fundraising could be one whole person’s job.

I also would have liked to be able to hire writers for Ada and hand it off. We trialled a bunch of people who were all really good writers in certain ways, but it was really hard to find the right fit for this project. I think if we were doing more episodes, there are pieces of both the creative and business side I could much more easily hand off than in that beginning stage. But also, I was not the only person doing three jobs. Pretty much everyone was doing three jobs.

Keiran Harris: I’m sure there are many, but is there one big, unexpected challenge that seemed like the most challenging thing for your team along the way?

Elizabeth Cox: Oh, yeah. Yes, there was. There was one big disaster that we resolved very well, but it was a disaster to start.

Keiran Harris: People love disasters. So let’s go.

Elizabeth Cox: I’ve said we chose a 3D pipeline for the character animation because we thought it was the most cost-effective way to achieve the quality standard we were looking for. Actually, for episode one, we did 3D characters in the real world and hand-drawn characters in the imagined world — so drawn frame by frame.

I mean, we were already building the tracks as we were riding the train — getting our pipelines into place and all the other parts we needed once we were already in production, in some cases — so everyone already felt like we were at the limit of what we could do. But it just became really clear by the end of it, we’ve gotten so far behind schedule and over budget that it was like, “OK, we have to change this pipeline. We can’t keep doing this.”

So we switched to a 3D pipeline for the imagined world too, which might seem like an easy switch, but we had to redesign and build, model, and rig all the characters for that imagined world, which are super important steps — because the quality of the rig (which is the skeleton and the controllers for it) basically determines the quality of animation that the animators can get. And if it’s not good, it creates tonnes of problems down the line.

So we had to do that. That also meant completely redefining the art direction and rendering style for the imagined world, and thinking about how having that much more to render from 3D would impact that part of our production timeline for each episode. It was just really nerve-racking because we had to do this without breaking step: change the whole thing, as we were doing it, and feeling as if we were already completely maxed out.

And I think it wasn’t really until two-thirds of the way through episode three that it was clear that episode three was actually coming in a little bit under budget, and this switch had worked and was equalising out. So that was the biggest challenge, for sure, but it worked. And I actually think the series is much better because of it.

I think the desire to try the hand-drawn thing at all was definitely driven by all of our attachment to the art and the craft of it, because I hired people for this project who feel similarly to how I do about that element of it — and definitely we were letting the feelings drive in that particular decision, and paid for it.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that makes sense.

Elizabeth’s hopes and dreams for Ada [01:53:10]

Keiran Harris: Do you have any hopes and dreams for… People watch Ada. They love it. They watch every episode, every minute. Do you have specific hopes and dreams for what happens next for them, in terms of how far away they might be from changing their career or changing their donations? Or is it very much this early stages thing of, “I just want people to grapple with questions in this area” — and then maybe this is the first domino, and we’ll come back in three years and we’ll find out that people have a similar story about Ada as you do with that short film?

Elizabeth Cox: I think that’s the dream. I would love that. And I would love for people to actually start working on some of the big questions that are raised in the episodes.

For me, maybe the subject I’m most passionate about in these five episodes is artificial wombs. And I would definitely like to see that subject get deweirded, and the sort of visceral ick that a lot of people have to it decrease. And also with that one, I would really love to make the point that the ethical questions they raise already exist with the level of reproductive technologies we have — and not making artificial wombs is not going to prevent these questions from needing to be solved or from causing big problems.

I definitely noticed a trend of talking about technologies that have the potential to prevent a lot of suffering or do a lot of good: the people who are thinking about them almost seem to hold them to a higher standard of pursuing this and making this. It’s like, “How will we make sure everyone has access?” Well, at first, everyone won’t have access — that’s the same it’s been with literally every innovation ever. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.

Keiran Harris: So you talked earlier about different theories of change depending on the episodes. Would you like to pick any of the others and go through them and say, “For this episode, here was my specific theory of change, or hopes and dreams for how people would react to it”?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, for sure. I think the AI one is an interesting example. In my head, I had this idea that it would be useful to have a piece on AI that was sort of a boring apocalypse: like, everyone has good intentions, the uses seem kind of mundane, everything goes to shit anyway. In my mind, I had people who are sceptical of some of the claims that AI safety is important — the semi-informed sceptics, I guess — when coming up with that plotline.

I think for gene drives, I guess where I landed with that one was that even if the technical stuff was going by you, the kind of central question there is about playing god, which is a concept everyone’s familiar with, right? It’s well trodden fiction terrain. And I guess the question posed by the episode that I think is a little different is: do we ever have an ethical obligation or a moral obligation to play god?

So I think you could get a lot of that core stuff even if the science was flying over your head.

And then another thing is that, especially in something that’s sort of episodic — in the way that Ada has a slight overarching plot, but each of the episodes can be watched alone — and based on the way people consume content online, I expect that they will be watched alone. So keeping that in mind too, it’s sort of OK if each episode is reaching slightly different audiences. We want to build a base of people who are invested in the character and are continuing to watch new episodes for that reason. But you also have to assume that there will be people stumbling on individual episodes in isolation.

Keiran Harris: Yeah. One we haven’t covered yet is the kidney donation episode. Did you have clear hopes and dreams for how that was going to land?

Elizabeth Cox: That one was a little interesting, because I think I was most at risk of getting sidetracked from my guiding stars of mission for the thing, and into practical calls to action.

But interestingly, the kidney episode was the most beloved of my team. And I think it’s because of this strong emotional arc. It’s also one I have a personal connection to: my grandfather was on dialysis for five years, and seeing up close the kind of horrendous suffering that entails, but also his will to live when confronted with it. It’s basically like every third day your blood goes through the machine. So you get one “good” day — I’m doing good in air quotes because it’s still not full health — to two bad days. And that’s just it, forever, with no hope of ever coming off that. So that was definitely part of my motivation for wanting to do it.

It’s interesting, because to me, the idea of paying kidney donors doesn’t seem radical; it seems like it makes total sense. I think there are a lot of really compelling arguments there. But because it’s such a cultural meme of, selling a kidney to do X, Y, or Z, it is going to be provocative no matter what — even though I think the tone of that one is more personal, more emotional, less overtly provocative than some of the others.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, yeah. Did you see that recently there was a news piece where, I’m not exactly sure the details, but there is a proposal now on the table for a $50,000 credit for kidney donors?

Elizabeth Cox: Yes! Very exciting.

Keiran Harris: I was wondering if you read that thinking both, “I am very happy that’s happening” and also, “It would have been nice if that happened three months after my episode came out.”

Elizabeth Cox: So this is the thing about animation: it’s slow. So I know I’m not going to be breaking news here. That’s part of why I think it’s a good medium for exploring evergreen topics in particular. Definitely also that partially informed the choices of what to focus on: what do I think will continue to be relevant or continue to be a point of contention or discussion about this topic?

Designing Ada with an eye toward impact [01:59:16]

Keiran Harris: Another point is that it also felt like the episodes very often ended with this message of “this stuff is really hard to think about.” Where you could have gone in the other direction, and tried to have the message be at the end, “Actually, it’s surprisingly easy to do a lot of good.” How conscious was that decision?

Elizabeth Cox: I think for the topics of the episodes, it is very hard to think about them and it is not that easy to do good. So I wanted to acknowledge that.

But I would also characterise the message they land on a little bit differently. I think Ada’s journey in every episode is that her views get complexified as the episodes go on, but they don’t land on a place of “this is impossible”; they end in a place of introspection and “I underestimated the complexity of this when I went charging in at the beginning of the episode.” But she keeps coming back for more. She’s not totally discouraged.

And I think that the ideas in the realm of more “it’s actually surprisingly easy to do good”: they’re very compelling once you hear them — but for me, what was most compelling and inspiring in the sort of school of EA ideas was the acknowledgement of the uncertainty and murkiness and dense webs of causality and things, and the acknowledgement of the difficulty in untangling some of that and the uncertainty that persists, but trying to do it anyway. So because that was the thing that was most inspiring for me, that was what I wanted to repeatedly acknowledge in the episodes themselves.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that makes sense. I know earlier you said that you weren’t having this goal that this is going to be explicitly effective altruism-y. But then you also mentioned in our chats preparing for this that you did have this maximising impact thing in your head as you were going through a lot of the smaller decisions. Do you want to talk through that? How central was that concept? And maybe give us some specific examples.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. I mean, completely central — in ways that’ll probably sound a little bit insane. But because the goal was to reach people who are not science fiction fans — and if they have heard about these topics, are probably put off by the way they’re discussed — the aesthetics, everything from art direction to character design to music and sound to the performance of the characters, to the tone of the writing, to the tone of the voice acting, all of that is essential to think through really carefully for creating a counterpoint to the aesthetic of traditional science fiction.

In the storyboards for episode one, and we were also doing an animation test prototype to figure out Ada’s body language and acting and stuff, there was this pose that kept coming up in the first storyboards I got back, that was her with her hands on her hips. To me, this was just like nails on a chalkboard, the most sort of grating thing, but in a way that I thought would be off-putting to a lot of women in particular. Like, “Oh, look at this cutesy sassy girl.” So basically, I banned hands on hips as a pose.

That was probably the smallest decision that was made explicitly with impact in mind. But a lot of decisions were made in that way — even things that seem kind of frivolous, or that you maybe wouldn’t think about that much. Like, her outfit was trying to strike a very particular tone of, definitely not “sexy assassin in skintight leather pants and a crop top” — which has been applied to alarmingly young girls in media historically — but also not “here is a big nerd doing big nerd things.”

She has her own unique style that matches her personality. It’s sort of loud and wacky, but we were working really hard not to make it tropey. I mean, the grumpy librarian’s a trope, so fine, but I think it’s a nice trope. But that definitely holds true around a lot of the choices we were making around characters and how to portray them.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that all makes sense. So we talked about this a bit earlier, it being incredibly difficult to actually track the total impact of a project like this. Do you have some idea of how you could begin to track its impact?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. So this is very much anecdata. Prior to it being distributed, we’ve been submitting it to festivals and screening it in festivals. And wherever possible, I’ve been attending those festivals, which has been my first opportunity to see it with an audience — and possibly my last, given the way people watch things, and them being online, and you not having that interface with the viewer.

So again, these are very inexact signals. But getting into festivals is good. Getting awards in festivals is good, which we have a few. But especially when I go to the screenings, I sit in the back and don’t watch the film; I watch the audience and see — because you really get a feeling in the room of how it’s landing with people, what parts people are responding to. One moment I had was the people sitting directly in front of me in a screening of the artificial wombs episode, as the credits were rolling, were debating some of the points in the episode with each other. And I was like, Yes! Perfect. It’s doing its job.”

But once it’s out-out, once it’s released, where available, data like views and retention and mentions of it are valuable signals. But I also think with media projects there is always an element of the judgement call. Because these kinds of accolades or views or whatever, they can be a signal that something is good and it’s making an impact — but that absence of them doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t, because there’s so much volatility and randomness in this stuff, and the fact that it might still be landing really well with people who are seeing it. So I do try to keep that in mind.

Alternative topics for Ada [02:05:33]

Keiran Harris: I know that you didn’t cover all of the topics and possible worlds that you wish you could have for Ada. Are there any that stand out that would have been particularly exciting, or you’re sad that you haven’t been able to cover it yet?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, there’s a couple that stand out and then I think there’s also many more I have not discovered yet. The one that’s most strange to me that it didn’t make it in, and that I would definitely do next is the whole brain emulation / digital people one — because that was sort of, for me, the whole catalyst for starting to think about this stuff. So it’s kind of funny that it didn’t make it in.

Keiran Harris: Yeah.

Elizabeth Cox: I would also love to do one on performance-enhancing drugs, specifically nontraditional definitions of that. So I’m not talking about for sports; I’m talking about cognitive performance-enhancing drugs and things like that. I just think that it could get so wacky and so fun. Similar to the gene drives: do we have an obligation to play god? Do we have an obligation to take performance-enhancing drugs? It’s one I’m super into.

Other topics of interest: I would love to do one from the perspective of Ada imagining what it’s like to live in an intergalactic civilisation, and what her experience is like there, as still one person on one world. And then there are a couple more policy ones I would love to do too: I would love to do an open immigration one, and maybe less urgently am interested in exploring one on charter cities.

Deciding on the best way to get Ada in front of people [02:07:12]

Keiran Harris: Did you start off with a clear goal for distribution? How it was going to be released? How has that progressed throughout the process?

Elizabeth Cox: I was really trying to make the goal be “get this in front of as many people as possible.” And sometimes the most prestigious or nice-on-paper distribution isn’t ideal for that. It’s actually not great to be on Netflix, if you’re buried on Netflix. And a lot of streamers, some of them still do licencing and acquisitions, but they understandably prioritise their own in-house productions in terms of what they push. So I didn’t really know where I wanted it to land, but I wanted it to be able to work in a variety of places.

Keiran Harris: Can you say some examples? You wanted it to work in a few different mediums — what were you thinking of there?

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah. Eleven minutes, which is effectively the length of the episodes, is a standard TV block. Usually you see two 11-minutes put together into a 22-minute or half-hour slot. That’s kind of a traditional TV format. A lot of that is sort of irrelevant on streamers, like anthology collections like Love, Death & Robots on Netflix, some of them are three minutes, some of them are half an hour. So a lot is shifting and changing about that, but the hope was that it could work for those formats if we wanted to go that route.

It’s also a really nice length for YouTube. And this is getting a little into the weeds, but I think part of the reason stuff in the 8–15 minutes range does so well on YouTube is that part of what goes into the YouTube algorithm is retention, which they define as the number of people watching until the end. And part of it is just absolute watch time, not normalised for video length. So I think 10, 11 minutes is kind of in that sweet spot of optimising for both of those things. Short videos can really get punished by the YouTube algorithm. So we were thinking, if it did end up there, then we wanted it to be a good length.

And also, I think very early on, I’d had this idea of doing more and shorter episodes. With animation, it really is a tradeoff of more and shorter / fewer and longer, because the cost scales really directly with the number of seconds of animation. I just found that that was the minimum length that could do these subjects anything approaching justice.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that would be my take as well. Naively, I would have maybe guessed that just putting them on YouTube would have been the way to maximise viewers. But it’s more complicated than that?

Elizabeth Cox: I think it is more complicated than that. I think just putting it on YouTube, as someone who does not already have a following and a channel on YouTube, is much more difficult to make that go well than I think people imagine. Although it is true that you can essentially just buy views, but they’re not going to be quality views. When I say I wanted as many people to see it as possible, I don’t mean I want a high number of views; I mean I want people to actually see it and watch it. Also, having worked on a big YouTube channel in the past, I had a little more of an understanding of what’s hard about that and also all the parts of that I didn’t want to do.

But I do think that you’re onto something. It’s sort of funny that a lot of commissioners and distributors I pitched were asking creators to help them solve the problem of discoverability of the content. That’s why people want you: to do that part for them. So there’s definitely a lot of turmoil and flux going on right now, both with how people find things, where they watch them, what they watch, what are the different formats even anymore? So it’s an interesting time.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, totally. Where can listeners watch Ada?

Elizabeth Cox: Ada will be available on TED-Ed’s YouTube channel in early January. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer and see updates on theatrical screenings at shouldwestudio.com. Also, for anyone in New York, we’re screening at the Regal theatre in Union Square on Saturday, December 7 — that’s part of the Dances with Films festival.

Career advice for creative writers [02:11:31]

Keiran Harris: All right, you’ve been so generous with your time, but we’re coming towards the end of the interview. But for any listeners, maybe especially younger listeners who have hopes and dreams of being creative writers, do you have anything you want to say to those people?

Elizabeth Cox: I think the first thing for anyone who wants to do creative work: obviously, it has a reputation for not being easy to get into, and in particular, that in junior creative roles, you’re totally fungible because there’s so many people who want to do them. And I think, given that, when you do get one, it’s easy to feel like, “I’m really lucky to have this job.” But the reality is if you’re doing a good job, they are also lucky to have you.

I think the perspective you don’t get is that hiring is a time-consuming and inexact science. And even when there’s a lot of people vying for a job, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get a good person. Once you have one, you really want to keep them. And I think people in early-career creative roles in particular don’t self-advocate as much as they should because of this dynamic that they feel is there — and you really do have to in order to progress, which is a whole other kind of bad. So I think that’s the first thing to know.

Keiran Harris: Totally. Do you have any generalisable advice for people who might be pursuing a creative career of any kind? It doesn’t have to necessarily be creative writing.

Elizabeth Cox: Again, with creative careers, just because of the dynamics of how many people want to do them and what opportunities are available, it is really important to be able to advocate for yourself. But I also think that sounds more intimidating than it is.

I think a lot of creative people are maybe shy and sensitive — which I am too — but you don’t have to have the personality of a Shark Tank contestant to be effective at networking. Like, if everyone you work with enjoys working with you, that’s networking. If you are talking to your peers and just generally talking about the stuff you’re interested in, your hopes and dreams, that’s networking. Because sooner than you think, your peers will be in decision-making positions and positions of power. Or your friends might find things that aren’t the right fit for them, but they pass on to you.

So don’t be intimidated by the kind of hustle aspect of it, because there are ways to do it that can suit any personality type. And if interviewing or public speaking or whatever is a sticking point — which again, I feel like it is for a lot of creative people — I think the way to approach that is to just find a way to be able to speak in your own words. Like, translate what you have to do into a way that sounds natural to you, rather than trying to imitate presentation speak or job interview speak or whatever.

Basically, I think anyone can do these things effectively with a little practice. And do practice: practice saying things out loud if you’re going to have to say them and you’re scared to.

And then the other thing is you just do have to pitch the right idea to the right person at the right time, and there’s no taking out that element of luck. But to maximise the chance that that happens, the most important thing you can do is just keep making stuff, and pursue things that interest you or that you think are important — even if it’s not immediately obvious how they’re going to convert into a product that’s ready for the world, or even anyone other than you to see. Just keep pursuing those interests, keep making stuff, keep finding out where they go — and then you’ll be ready, if the right opportunity does come along, to pitch it.

Keiran Harris: Nice. Anything else in the advice category?

Elizabeth Cox: I also think for writers, it’s important and maybe counterintuitive to get critique partners or beta readers who are themselves working in the same genre or format or age group as you. That’s something I didn’t do for a long time. I just picked people I knew who I knew were good writers or editors to read stuff in kind of unrelated genres. It was just much less effective than joining a group of people who were trying to write similar things, because they’re all kind of immersed in the craft and conventions of whether it’s fantasy or whatever.

And then for artists, your portfolio matters more than anything else. So have a few really solid things rather than a bunch of stuff, and make things in the discipline you want to get a job in. I hear surprisingly often from people who want to be a storyboard artist, but their portfolio is all background illustration or similar mismatch. So definitely have a few really solid things in whatever the thing is, you want to do a few solid pieces.

And then, get advice from someone who’s just a few years older than you or a few years further along in their career and has the job you want to have. People who have gone through it less recently are going to have less relevant advice. You don’t have to find the most senior person you can get to answer your email to give you advice; just find someone who has the job you want to have next, and ask them how they got it.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, that makes sense. Great.

Wikipedia book spoilers [02:17:05]

Keiran Harris: As a final question, you wrote to me that your chaotic trait is “reading the entire Wikipedia plot summary for a novel I’ve just started.” And I’ve got to say, me and my wife are so allergic to spoilers that this just struck me as being completely bonkers. Do you care to defend this insanity?

Elizabeth Cox: I mean, you’re not the only people who think it’s bonkers. Definitely I have friends and colleagues who won’t even watch trailers for things.

Keiran Harris: Well, yeah. Me too.

Elizabeth Cox: But for me, it’s not about what happens; it’s about how it happens. And any plot does not sound interesting as a plot summary, so I don’t really feel that it spoils anything for me. And I think execution is everything. Like, there’s a reason you can’t copyright ideas. But even as a consumer of stories, I viscerally feel that; I just don’t feel that it really spoils anything for me.

And I’ll do this with museum exhibits too: I’ll dash through the whole thing and then go back to the beginning and go through it at a normal pace.

But I do think part of it is maybe slightly pathological. I cannot turn off the part of me that’s curious about “how is this particular sausage made?” I can’t turn off the part that’s thinking about how different things were achieved, and how they’re going to get from A to B, and “Oh, I see.” All that kind of stuff. So yeah, reading and watching movies and TV shows is not really a great way to relax for me, I guess.

Keiran Harris: Yeah, it’s really interesting because I think if I get something spoiled, I can definitely still be with you, and have the same experience of really enjoying it on this more technical level of like, “How are they going to do this?” Or even, this happens more naturally if you watch something for a second time.

But I feel like you’re giving up this extra experience — which I’m having, that you might not — which is just sort of losing yourself in this world, and being genuinely surprised, and that producing emotions. If you’re in the moment, you’re immersed in the film. If you can forget you’re watching a film, I think that is a sign of success. It’s like the filmmakers have done their job if you forget that’s just a screen in front of you. But if you read the entire plot summary, I feel like you can’t have that experience.

Elizabeth Cox: I feel like I can’t have that experience anymore anyway. But I will say that reading the plot summary creates a different kind of anticipation for me. If you know someone’s going to die and there’s this tender moment, you’re like, “Ahhh!”

But look, I’m not going to argue that this isn’t weird or compulsive behaviour. I think part of it is also probably because I’m highly susceptible to imaginary worlds. I think I started doing this because it’s really hard for me to just not watch the entire show or read the entire book/series, and not do anything until I finish it — which is not super viable. Maybe it was viable when I was 17 or whatever, but not now. So a way to soothe the compulsion that I can do in five minutes instead of taking my whole day is just to read what happens.

Keiran Harris: I think actually that makes perfect sense. If your two options are like, “I am going to compulsively binge watch this thing; that’s going to be my next three days,” or, “I scratch the itch, and then I’ll come back at my leisure,” that might be better for the world.

All right. Well, this has been a delight. My guest today has been Elizabeth Cox. Thanks so much for doing this.

Elizabeth Cox: Yeah, thanks. It’s been super fun.

Luisa’s outro [02:20:42]

Luisa Rodriguez: Just a reminder that you’ll be able to find Elizabeth’s show Ada for free online via TED-Ed’s YouTube channel in early January. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer and see upcoming theatrical screenings on shouldwestudio.com, and Keiran just put the pilot script and a 10-episode outline for his show Bequest on the Effective Altruism Forum if you wanted to check that out. There are links for those in the show notes for this episode.

All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Additional content editing by myself and Katy Moore.

Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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